About the Journal

Focus and Scope

OSI is a global collaborative effort between all major stakeholders in scholarly publishing to improve the future of how research information gets published, shared and accessed. The foundation of this effort is a 10-year series of annual meetings where high-level stakeholder representatives work together to solve important issues. Collaboration outside these meetings will also occur. OSI Proceedings presents the questions discussed in the OSI Conference and will publish the results of workshop sessions.

Publication Frequency

The OSI working group proposed organizing high level annual meetings between all key stakeholders, beginning in early 2016, to clarify the path forward for scholarly publishing. These stakeholders will meet annually for 10 years to incorporate feedback and fine-tune solutions. An annual meeting format creates a future where decision makers from all stakeholder groups can come together regularly to share perspectives, find common ground, make plans, and follow up on previous agreements.

OSI Proceedings and Issue Briefs are published as they become avaliable throughout the year.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Journal History

What should the future of scholarly publishing look like? How about open access? Who should decide? Can journals become more affordable and accessible? Will journals continue to serve as the primary means of communicating research? Can institutional repositories work together more effectively to integrate the world’s knowledge? Finding the answers to these and other related questions is important for research growth, research funding, public education and policy development, global economic development, global information access and equity, and more. And there are many different stakeholder groups working to find the answers. But not together, and not until now.

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is an ambitious, global effort to establish high level dialogue and cooperation on these issues. OSI is managed by the Science Communication Institute (SCI) in long-term partnership with UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). OSI will bring together a diverse and high-level group of scholarly publishing decision makers from around the globe into a series of annual meetings that are thoughtfully designed and constructed so these leaders can personally share their ideas and perspectives and look for common ground and actionable solutions. Decisions agreed to at the inaugural 2016 meeting (supported, managed and hosted by George Mason University) will be revisited and refined at annual meetings over the next 10 years, with the goal of ensuring that solutions are workable and widely adopted, and that new and remaining issues are continually reviewed and agreed-to solutions are fine-tuned.

Conference delegates who are being identified and invited to participate in these meetings are C-level representatives from key stakeholder groups in scholarly publishing around the world, representing governments, journal publishing, open access, universities and research institutions, faculty groups, scholarly societies, libraries, research funders, regulatory agencies, public policy groups, STEM education groups, journalism, and more. Every effort is being made to construct a fair and balanced delegate list.

ISSN

2473-6236