The digital world is rapidly changing and there is a substantial amount of data and information being shared online all over the world, creating a critical need for simultaneous security and privacy applications. Blockchain technology is transforming the way we do business and is helping to significantly reduce costs and boost efficiency, while also interacting with cyber security and enhancing the security of shared data, making it difficult or impossible to hack or cheat the system.

You’ve heard of full journals receiving OA funding support, but did you know that if you are guest editing an OA special issue, that it is entirely possible to receive full OA funding on the special issue-level? Oftentimes, when OA funding has not yet been secured for the full journal, there is success in obtaining OA funding on a smaller scale, for a set number of articles (typically a special themed issue), which can then later put the full journal one step closing to becoming platinum.

Technology is impacting education now more than ever. This stems from not only the rapid increase of technology use in the classroom, but the urgent need for students and teachers to be able to easily connect from a distance when in-person teaching and learning is not possible.

As OA publications continue to trend upwards, authors and researchers who submit their work as OA, either as an individual journal article, book chapter, or full book, continue to experience the ever-present struggles of finding a funding body to sponsor their work.

Nova Southeastern University is proud to host Power Publishing Day on January 27th, 2022. Power Publishing Day aims to focus on sharing scholarly research globally. This event will include a day learning about academic publishing from editors, publishers, and Nova Southeastern faculty.

As we enter 2022, IGI Global is once again set to increase its open access (OA) holdings dramatically in the new year. Having converted another batch of 30 hybrid OA/subscription-based journals to gold OA and at the same time launching three wholly new gold OA journals, there are a plethora of OA publishing opportunities for interested authors.

With the uncertainty that 2020 brought, no one was quite sure what to expect in 2021. As people all over the globe continued their teaching, learning, and research endeavors remotely, the need for greater content accessibility reached a critical point and publishers needed to adjust accordingly.

The open access (OA) movement is invaluable during a time when free and accessible research is needed to drive innovation and solve the world’s problems. However, as with everything, nothing is ever completely free.

Each week IGI Global is releasing a huge volume of open access (OA) scholarly articles and book chapters out into the open research community. Now, more than ever, it is critical that those freely accessible manuscripts become disseminated and discoverable as is their intended use.

We at IGI Global have been committed to open science for several years now, first starting with hybrid open access publishing models for all our books and journals and then in January 2021, converting 30 of our hybrid subscription-based journals to full gold open access (OA). In January 2022, 30 more of our journals will convert to gold OA, leading to more than 35% of our journal collection publishing fully open.

As a researcher and contributor to scholarly works, it is important that you are receiving proper credit for your efforts and able to distinguish yourself from every other researcher out there. Through the use of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), it is possible to do just that. ORCID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies researchers and scholarly contributors and their professional information – including affiliations, grants, publications, peer review activities, and more.

Behind any credible scholarly publishing process is the vital double-blind peer review, backed by highly qualified experts in their respective fields. Whether an open access or subscription-based publication, vetting research is incredibly important to ensure accuracy and integrity.

In its tenth year, Open Access Week continues to be an opportunity for the academic and research communities to learn about the benefits of and new horizons of open access. This year, Open Access Week ran from October 25th to October 31st with the theme: “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity”.

IGI Global understands that there are still a lot of questions surrounding Open Access (OA) publishing. Our Newsroom has been a wonderful platform for us to share all the latest industry news, case studies, events, and more regarding the vast dimensions of OA.

The act of submitting a manuscript to any publication is more than just uploading a word document and clicking “submit”. So much time, energy, and dedication go into preparing and finalizing research before it is submitted and goes through the peer review process.

This year’s International Open Access Week will take place from October 25-31, 2021. The theme for this year is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.” The theme intentionally aligns with UNESCO’s (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Recommendation on Open Science, which is expected to define shared values and principles for open science and identify concrete measures on open access and open data, with proposals to bring citizens closer to science and commitments to facilitate the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge around the world.

As journals have become more digital over the last several years, publishers are striving to break away from the limitations that traditional print/issue schedules present, and instead are opting to migrate to a more continuous pace. Research becomes dated quite quickly and risks losing its value if it sits for too long, and waiting for the assembly of a monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, etc. issue for articles to be published can be a huge detriment to timely research dissemination.

Over the past several years, academia and scholarly publishing have turned into a data-driven endeavor that hinges on the citation impact, indexing, and prestige of research. Due to this shift, academics are not only now challenged with teaching classes, conducting office hours, researching and writing, continuing education, participating in various societies and associations, and more, but they must also ensure that their research work is highly discoverable and accessible.

Since the onset of Plan S, transformative Read & Publish and Publish & Read agreements are becoming the new standard for library acquisitions and are leading to a higher level of prioritization of open access. With hundreds of libraries investing in these models and nearly every party in the academic community discussing the benefits, library consortia have now started to prioritize open access publishing in their contracts.