Thanks to the progressive awareness of our research staff on this issue and the transformative agreements that CSIC has signed with the main scientific publishers, the number of articles not freely accessible, either through the gold route (articles in open access in the editorial version) or the green route (articles accessible by self-archiving in the repository), has been reduced to an average of 9 % over the last five years.
In 2023, for example, 153 of the 207 published articles are directly accessible on the publishers' pages, without the need for subscription, and all 207 are uploaded in Digital.CSIC, as observed in the following figure. We have to thank all our researchers for the effort, our Direction, for always giving support to Open Access, and our Librarian & Documentalist, Alejandro Santos, for all the work done in this sense.
Graphic representening number of articles per year: total publications, open access publications (including gold, bronze, green and hybrid) and publications uploaded in Digital.CSIC | ICMAB-CSIC
Digital.CSIC has also undertaken new Open Science initiatives, such as free peer-review through an agreement with the Peer Community In platform, a non-profit, non-commercial organisation that offers a way to publish in open access at no cost to authors or readers, as a convincing alternative to costly commercial journals. Or Diamond in Green, the management and publication of diamond open access journals (i.e. with no publication or subscription costs) directly in the repository, such as the journal Psicológica, from the Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology.
The open access mandates of national research plans and projects funded by EU institutions have eliminated lag times for open access publication, making the inclusion of publications, including datasets, in the institutional repository even more necessary. In this line, Digital.CSIC offers support resources for the preparation of Data Management Plans, increasingly required by funding agencies.
Likewise, in 2023 the CSIC set up the Coara-CSIC Commission for the progressive implementation in our institution of the principles of this international initiative for the reform of scientific evaluation, which includes, among its founding commitments, the support and promotion of Open Science.
This year’s theme of the International Open Access Week continues the call to put “Community over Commercialization” and prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.
Learn more:
International Open Access Week