The HardiBlog

Today we are talking to Malavika Legge about the future of Open Access publishing. Malavika is Program Manager for OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association). Hardy: Hi Malavika, nice talking to you! Can you please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at OASPA? Malavika : Sure, thanks, Hardy. I started my career at a very big publishing organisation. I was working for a division called Informa Health Care , which belongs to Informa, the company that also owns Taylor and Francis. I was working mostly on journals, but also on books, databases and encyclopedias. I then moved to the Biochemical Society , leading on the journals programme for this self-publishing learned society. Since 2012, first at Informa and then also at the Biochemical Society, my focus has gravitated towards Open Access: How can a meaningful, reasonable, fair transition to Open Access be enabled from the publisher's side? And while I was at the Biochemical Society, I helped to form the Society...

In this post we are hearing from Ronán Kennedy, Head of Collections in University of Galway Library about the very current #ebookSOS campaign and its background.     #ebookSOS began in 2020 as a movement in the UK when Librarian Johanna Anderson consistently encountered obstacles when trying to provide ebook access for a new course at her institution. Momentum quickly gathered throughout the UK and internationally as more and more institutions were encountering the same issues across the academic publishing sector. A very brief explainer on YouTube can be found here . The main aim of #ebookSOS is a call to investigate the provision of and pricing of titles in the academic ebook market. The current poor business practises from publishers create bad faith and a lack of trust and confidence among stakeholders such as libraries, patrons and faculty. The campaign has gathered significant support internationally, with libraries, universities, academics, student unions, and ...