The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to

open access book An open-access monograph (open-access book or OA book) is a scholarly publication usually made openly available online with an open license. These books are freely accessible to the public, typically via the internet. They are part of the open ac ...

s and open scholarly infrastructure.''This article incorporates material from th
OASPA website
which is licensed under the

Creative Commons Attribution License A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bui ...

.''

History

The OASPA was launched on October 14, 2008 at an "Open Access Day" celebration in London hosted by the

Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of Burroughs Wellcome, one of the predec ...

. The following organizations are founding members: *

BioMed Central BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open a ...

* Co-Action Publishing *

Copernicus Publications Copernicus Publications (also: Copernicus GmbH) is a publisher of scientific literature based in Göttingen, Germany. Founded in 1994, Copernicus Publications currently publishes 28 peer-reviewed open access scientific journals and other publica ...

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Hindawi was a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by Wiley (publisher), John Wil ...

JMIR Publications The ''Journal of Medical Internet Research'' is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal established in 1999 covering eHealth and "healthcare in the Internet age". The editors-in-chief are Gunther Eysenbach and Rita Kukafka. The publisher is JM ...

* Medical Education Online (David Solomon) *

Public Library of Science PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched its ...

SAGE Publications Sage Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent academic publishing company, founded in 1965 in New York City by Sara Miller McCune and now based in the Newbury Park neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, California. Sage ...

* SPARC Europe *

Utrecht University Library Utrecht University (UU; , formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2023, it had an enrollment of 39,769 students, a ...

The OASPA faced some criticism for a perceived conflict between its self-declared role as the "stamp of quality for open access publishing" and the application of its own criteria for membership. One member organization,

Frontiers Media Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with off ...

, was included on

Jeffrey Beall Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the o ...

's list of

predatory open access publishing Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misle ...

companies. Two members, Hindawi and

MDPI MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open-access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article o ...

- initially called predatory by Beall - were later removed from his list after pressure was applied to his employer. There was also concern around the fact that OASPA had been founded by

and other open access publishers, which would cause a conflict of interest in their "seal of approval". OASPA has also been criticized for promoting

gold open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

in a way that may be at the expense of

green open access Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as ...

Activities

OASPA organizes an annual conference on open access scholarly publishing. OASPA encourages publishers to use

Creative Commons licenses A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bui ...

, particularly the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which is in line with most definitions of "open", e.g. the

Open Definition The Open Definition (formerly Open Knowledge Definition) is published by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) to define openness for any type of data, content, or other knowledge. The definition's stated purpose is to " akeprecise the meaning o ...

by the

Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, England. It is incorporated in Engla ...

Members

OASPA members fall into the following groups: Professional publishing organisations – Organisations that include at least one full-time professional who manages the publication of OA scholarly journals or books. These organisations may be for-profit or nonprofit, and they may own journals or books or manage the publication on a contract basis for societies or other groups of scientists or scholars. Members of this class may also include organisations such as academic/research libraries, university presses, or other organisations in which the primary focus is other than publishing but still employ full-time professionals who manage the publication of OA scholarly journals and/or books. Scholar publishers – Individuals or small groups of scientists/scholars that publish usually a single scholarly journal in their field of study. The publication process is often largely subsidised by volunteer effort. Other organisations – Other organisations who provide significant services and/or support for OA publishing. In order to join OASPA as a member organization, a publisher must undergo an assessment process and meet set criteria. These criteria were set in 2013 and revised again in August 2018. There are seven categories of OASPA membership: * Professional Publishing Organisation (Small) * Professional Publishing Organisation (Medium) * Professional Publishing Organisation (Large) * Professional Publishing Organisation (Very Large) * Other Organisation (non-commercial) * Other Organisation (commercial) * Scholar Publisher As of March 2021, OASPA has 159 members. Members of OASPA that publish journals exclusively in OA comprise the Fully Open Access Publishers special interest group.

Response to the ''Science'' sting

As a response to the ''

Who's Afraid of Peer Review? "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by ''Science'' correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake s ...

'' investigation, OASPA formed a committee to investigate the circumstances that led to the acceptance of the fake paper by 3 of its members. On 11 November 2013, OASPA terminated the membership of two publishers (

Dove Medical Press Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open-access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London (United Kingdom); Princeton, New Jersey (United States); and Auckland (New Zealand). In September 2017, ...

and Hikari Ltd.) who accepted the fake paper. Sage Press, which also accepted a fake paper, was put "under review" for 6 months. Sage announced in a statement that it was reviewing the journal that accepted the fake paper, but that it would not shut it down. Sage's membership was reinstated at the end of the review period following changes to the journal's editorial processes. Dove Medical Press were also reinstated in September 2015 after making a number of improvements to their editorial processes.

References

External links