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Support for fair open access to scientific information

The ULB and the Department of Libraries and scientific information support Fair Open Access, immediate open access to scientific publications on a non-commercial model. Open Access Logo

Faced with the dominance of large commercial publishers and the increasing costs they generate, both in terms of paying journal subscriptions and paying APCs for publishing open access articles, it is necessary to support another model of sustainable, non-commercial open access scholarly publishing, implemented by the scientific community for the scientific community, in accordance with the principles of « Fair Open Access ».

To this end, the ULB has set up a budget to support open scholarly communication initiatives.

This fund aims to support :

  1. non-commercial publishing initiatives implemented by scholars, providing open access to scientific content and/or allowing researchers to publish in open access at no cost to the author (Diamond OA - without payment of APC by the author) ;
  2. non-commercial open infrastructures by and for the scholarly community, enabling this community to collect, store, organise, access, share and evaluate research;
  3. the publication of books in immediate open access, published by the ULB publishing house, Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles. 

Initiatives supported by ULB

PCI
Non-profit organization of researchers offering peer review, recommendation and publication of scientific articles in open access for free. There are more than 15 thematic communities.
Scipost
A complete online non-profit publication portal managed by and for scientists. SciPost publishes about ten journals, mainly in science, without APC, following a rigorous editorial process.
OpenEditionJournals
Platform for access to Open Access journals in SSH (nearly 600 journals in OA).
Erudit
Platform for access to Open Access journals and books, mainly in SSH, resulting from the collaboration of Quebec universities (more than 300 journals and books in OA).
DOAJ
Online directory of over 20,000 journals entirely in OA and meeting quality criteria. DOAJ contains more than 9,000,000 articles from reliable open access journals.
ORCID
Non-profit organisation providing a persistent digital identifier for researchers (ORCID iD).
Clockss
CLOCKSS provides a digital preservation service for scientific content to ensure the long-term preservation and open access of these digital resources, should they disappear from the Web.
Non-profit organization that publishes open bibliographic and citation data using semantic web technologies, offering free access to over 1.3 billion citations.
The ULB commits to promote the initiatives it supports among its scholarly community and to consider them as valid publication venues in the researcher's evaluation process.

Do you have an idea for a fair Open Access initiative to support?

Contact
Françoise VANDOOREN
Service de support aux missions transversales
Tél : +32 (0)2 650 49 95
francoise.vandooren@ulb.be

More about Fair Open Access

Fair Open Access is based on a diverse scholarly publishing ecosystem, preserving bibliodiversity, improving access to research outputs, allowing the scholarly community to regain control of the publishing system on a not-for-profit basis, and removing any financial constraints on the author.

There are many non-profit initiatives aimed at enabling the scientific community to regain control of scientific publishing, both in terms of dissemination of research results (open access journals and books) and infrastructure (such as publication measurement tools independent of the major scientific publishers).

These initiatives need the support of the scholarly community.

Aligned with the EUA's Open Science Agenda 2025, ULB wants to support "a just scholarly publishing ecosystem that is transparent, diverse, economically affordable and sustainable, technically interoperable, and steered by the research community and its institutions [...]. " " (The EUA Open Science Agenda 2025, February 2022, European University Association.) 

This is why ULB has set up a budget to support fair Open Access initiatives.

“If you only give resources to paywalled content, all you’ll get is paywalls”
(Lucy Barnes, COPIM, Webinar Open Access Books – making it work, 16/02/2022).