Thirteen publishers and twelve research funders are collaborating in a new project aimed at advancing open access (OA) publishing. The project, which began earlier this year, builds on the collaborative work done in the OA Switchboard community and previous pilots in 2022. Participants in the project believe that standardization, metadata, transparency, and persistent identifiers (PIDs) are crucial to the transformation to OA.
The participating publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Copernicus, and The Royal Society, are making their content and structured metadata available for advanced searching on the names of research funders in all variations known to be in use. The publishers aim to provide better quality reporting to research funders on relevant publications by sending P1-messages via OA Switchboard in bulk.
The twelve research funders, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Wellcome Trust, are interested in the data in the P1-messages and aggregated reports to support policy compliance and development, open access publication-level arrangements, and increasing the visibility of open access.
The pilot project's hypothesis is that there is valuable information on research funding related to research output "hidden" in the current system that can be extracted and shared with stakeholders systematically.
The project's participants aim to gain a better understanding of different approaches, systems, and best practices of research funders and publishers. They will also explore standardization and technical options to make metadata available in publishers' systems, not only in OA Switchboard P1-messages but also in open data sources such as Crossref.
The project is expected to run until June 2023, with results and recommendations to be communicated via the project's blog before summer. Interested parties can sign up for the project's newsletter to receive alerts.
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