Month: October 2023

New UC Office of Scholarly Communication Resource: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication

The Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California has published “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication,” a resource intended to guide reflection and action to address the lack of DEI in scholarly communication. Endorsed by the UC Academic Council and the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, sections focus on peer review and editorial boards, authors, scholarly publishers and libraries. Within each section the authors provide research and data on inequities within the community to define the problems and actions individuals and organizations within those communities can take. For example:

  • all sectors can take steps to diversify their workforces;
  • publishers can adopt practices to attract and support a wide pool of participants;
  • libraries can incorporate anti-racist practices into instruction, outreach and research services;
  • peer reviewers can learn about unconscious bias; and
  • authors can advocate for themselves and others.

Suggested actions are referenced with tools for guidance. The authors address the need for demographic data and encourage authors, reviewers and editors to declare their gender, race and ethnicity, and publishers to collect the data. They recognize that people are in different positions of power to affect change. They offer each of us a resource that is well documented and well organized. Each of us needs to determine the focus of our commitment to making scholarly communication more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

American Chemical Society announces a new, $2,500 author rights buy-back charge

On September 21st, the American Chemical Society (ACS) announced a new “Zero- Embargo Green Open Access” option that “allows” authors to purchase back their rights to a submitted manuscript, for a fee of $2,500, to post it immediately to a repository. Calling it an article development charge, ACS is trying to create a new revenue stream from research to which they’ve contributed no services under the false pretense of funder mandates. This new source of revenue would be complemented by publication charges in the forms of subscriptions, author processing charges or read and publish agreements with institutions.

Funders do not require researchers to pay a fee to make their works immediately and openly available. Coalition S, a group of European funding organizations, made it clear in this Plan S blog post that ACS’ new charge is a violation of author rights and contrary to the principles of open science. The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has also issued a statement emphasizing the fundamental freedom and equity of researchers’ rights to deposit their works in repositories at no cost.

“COAR strongly encourages others in the scholarly community to raise their objections to this fee, and in particular, urges ACS authors and all researchers to refuse to sign over the rights to their Article Accepted Manuscripts, or pay any charges to share a work that they already own.

COAR’s response to the American Chemical Society’s new fee for repository deposit

Our challenge is to recognize the value of open science that is evaluated not on the basis of who publishes it but on the merits and reproducibility of the work. Only then will publishers like the American Chemical Society be forced to justify their contributions to their disciplines and society.