#57 KOALA – Building Support for Diamond Open Access

Katie Smart served as a research librarian at UiT The Arctic University of Norway from 2022 to 2025. A geologist with research experience from three countries (Canada, Germany, South Africa), Katie's role at UiT was as a specialist in open science services. In this episode, she discusses different local and national services for open science that she has been involved in and emphasizes that marketing open science to academia must include the perspective of the target audience: the researchers. Although open science can be framed benefiting academia and society as a whole, in order to get strong buy-in from academia it must also be framed as to how it will propel each individual’s career. For more details, including a transcript of the entire episode, see https://doi.org/10.7557/19.8152.

How can Diamond Open Access be funded? The Finnish Federation of Learned Societies (TSV) hosts a platform with more than 150 learned society journals and are distributing governmental funding to cover the operating costs of under-financed national Diamond journals. In Canada, the majority of scholarly journals are Diamond thanks to library resources and governmental funds. More than 250 Canadian journals are showcased by Érudit. In the Netherlands, a fund to help medium to large size journals transition away from a commercial business model has been launched. The three interlocutors each have prominent roles in these funding schemes. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/19.8114.

In 2017, the University of Lorraine cancelled its subscription to Springer and in 2023, it cancelled its deal with Wiley. The money saved has been channeled into an Open Science Fund which supports open research infrastructures, training and support programmes for open research, and diamond open access publishing. With additional financing from regional research institutes and the national ministry, its annual budget currently amounts to approximately 500,000 Euros. A broad representative committee has been set up to decide on the use of the fund. In this episode, the Vice-President for Open Research and the Head of Research Support at the Library of the Université de Lorraine explain the Lorraine Model. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/19.8074.

The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) published its first dataset on June 13, 2014. Since then, the repository has grown to 173 datasets, each of which is available in open access and equipped with metadata explaining its contents. Two of the most frequent users of the archive, professor of Russian linguistics Laura A. Janda and postdoc of English linguistics Lukas Sönning share their experiences and ideas for the future. A key message is how using a curated data repository has helped raising the quality of their own research by making it more transparent and reusable for others. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/19.7631.

The German initiative KOALA (in English, Building Consortial Open Access Solutions) is a bottom-up initiative that negotiates funding for Diamond Open Access by cutting into library budgets. By pooling resources from more than a hundred research libraries across Germany, KOALA has so far secured funding for ten peer-reviewed journals and two book series. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at doi.org/10.7557/19.7561.

The non-profit initiative IOI (Invest in Open Infrastructure) works to increase the investment in, and adoption of, open infrastructure. This podcast episode was recorded in conjunction with the launch of the collaboratively developed, openly available Infra Finder database. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/19.7551.

This episode discusses Diamond Open Access publishing services provided by institutions, occasioned by a recent landscape report on Institutional Publishing in the European Research Area and a synopsis of the same report. The main findings of the report are contextualized alongside previously assembled knowledge on Diamond Open Access journals and other on-going and future projects in the field. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/19.7418.

A discussion on SPARC Europe's report "Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe" (Zenodo, 28 June 2023). Three of the authors of the report share their thoughts on why the landscape differs so much between countries. They also look to the future of Rights Retention Policies across Europe. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/19.7387.

Podcast version of the closing panel discussion at The 18th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing (Tromsø, Norway, 8–10 November 2023). The panel consisted of champions of research assessment reform (Yensi Flores Bueso, University of Washington / University College Cork; Kirstie Whitaker, The Alan Turing Institute) and university leaders (Hervé Dole, vice-president for arts, culture and society at Université Paris-Saclay; Jan-Gunnar Winther, pro-rector for research and development, UiT The Arctic University of Norway). More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/19.7356.

Felix Schönbrodt speaks about his work within the German Psychological Society, where he is part of a committee that has developed a set of guidelines for Responsible Research Assessment. A professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, Schönbrodt is also the leader of LMU’s Open Science Centre and has been working actively to promote reproducibility and transparency in science for many years. More details, including a transcript of the entire episode, can be found at doi.org/10.7557/19.7344.