UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mihoko Hosoi, Penn State University Libraries associate dean for collections, research and scholarly communications, was among a group of librarians, college and university administrators, trainers and others invited to participate during a recent virtual listening session hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
The June 12 public listening session was part of a series called A Year of Open Science, which aims to explore perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for advancing open science in the United States and solutions that might be considered for implemention by the federal government.
During the listening session, titled “Open Science Possibilities for Training and Capacity Building: Perspectives from the Early Career Researcher-Supporting Community,” Hosoi expressed support for the Aug. 24, 2022, OSTP memo that aims to support free, immediate and equitable access to federally funded research.
“I am glad that researchers can satisfy the new policy by depositing the final peer-reviewed accepted manuscript into an agency-designated repository,” Hosoi said. “At the same time, I hope that there is a public funding mechanism that supports early career researchers through gold open access because it provides immediate access to the version of record on the publisher’s website, the article is often linked to related work, and this is where researchers share their work among their scholarly community. The work needs to be not just open but also discoverable, reusable without additional fees, and cited correctly to acknowledge the author's work.”
Hosoi also discussed the importance of transparency related to article processing charges, sometimes known as publication fees, which are typically paid by researchers to facilitate the costs of open access publication in lieu of a scholarly journal’s subscription fees. Hosoi also sought support to ease the financial burden on research-intensive universities and less-affluent institutions, noted that scholars need to be supported through global collaboration because they move and collaborate globally, and expressed support toward UNESCO’s Open Science initiatives, including establishing international funding mechanisms to support open science.
Penn State University Libraries promotes open access (OA), open educational resources, open publishing and many other open scholarship initiatives. Dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications Faye A. Chadwell leads the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) at Penn State. The University Libraries has negotiated OA publishing agreements with Cambridge University Press, Public Library of Science (PLOS), SAGE, Institute of Physics (IOP), Microbiology Society, and Wiley. These agreements cover OA publishing charges for Penn State corresponding authors publishing in these publishers’ journals. Those qualified articles will be immediately open access on the publisher’s platform, and authors retain copyright in their articles.
The University Libraries also supports open access through the implementation of the University’s open access policy and by funding open access monograph publishing by university presses through the TOME Initiative and the Libraries Open Publishing Program.
For more information about open access initiatives supported by the University Libraries, users and researchers should send inquiries to openaccess@psu.edu.