Category: news

As the global transition to open access continues, the scholarly communication ecosystem faces a critical challenge: while substantial funds circulate within the system, they remain largely organized around paywalled models rather than structured to fully support open dissemination.

Institutions are now working to realign these investments to enable a fairer, more transparent flow of resources that advances open access. At the same time, publishers are re-evaluating their business models—considering how best to sustain the quality services that research communities rely on, while moving away from subscription-based systems toward open access.

To address these challenges, the OA2020 Working Group on Financial Flows and Cost Modeling is collecting data on current financial flows and publishing patterns to model how they might evolve in a fully open access world. Through detailed analyses of regional participation, the application of equitable pricing frameworks, and collaboration with publishers sharing anonymized data, the group aims to understand what fairer cost distributions and more equitable alignment with research output and global participation might look like.

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We are excited to announce the launch of a Joint Task Force on Negotiating Openness of Publication Metadata, established in partnership between the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information and the OA2020 Initiative.

This Joint Task Force represents an important step in uniting efforts to bring greater transparency to scholarly publication metadata; an essential component of a fair, inclusive, and truly open research ecosystem.

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of the seminal Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. In the upcoming 16th Berlin Open Access Conference, organized by the OA2020 Initiative and hosted by the Max Planck Society, we will return to the setting where the Berlin Declaration originated. There, we will refine and renew our approaches to achieving the vision for an open information environment in the service of science and society, with a particular focus on transformative agreements (TAs).

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The ongoing transition of scholarly publishing to full and immediate Open Access is a process that requires all stakeholders to adapt. 

Alignment amongst research funding organizations, publishers and research performing organizations – with their research communities, their libraries and library consortia – is particularly needed to enable smaller independent publishers to transition to open access publishing models. These publishers are highly valued by the research community for their activities in promoting excellence in research, for the scholarly communication services they provide, and for the key role they play in ensuring a diverse, open scholarly publishing landscape. 

Transformative arrangements – including Read & Publish and Subscribe to Open as well as other innovative models – can provide a scalable, sustainable, and revenue-neutral way for publishers to transition to full and immediate Open Access. However, to ensure that smaller independent publishers can do this we must manage risks related to their size and scale. We, the undersigned, will work together to minimize complexity and maximize efficiency and to support the transition of smaller independent publishers to sustainable, equitable, immediate Open Access publishing models.

Signatures
ALPSP
cOAlition S
CRL
ESAC
JISC
LYRASIS
OA2020

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The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) has signed an Expression of Interest for the Open Access 2020 (OA2020) Initiative, a global initiative led by the Max Planck Digital Library with the goal of unlocking scholarly journals from subscription publishing systems and transitioning them towards open access models.

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UC San Diego joins OA2020 – read the press release…

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All German research articles in Wiley journals to be published open access under new transformative agreement Germany’s Projekt DEAL and the publisher John Wiley & Sons have entered a ground-breaking transformative agreement, in line with the objectives of the Open Access 2020 initiative. Under this new agreement, all authors affiliated with 700 academic institutions in[…]

In order to accelerate the transition of scholarly publishing to an open access paradigm, the global research community united in the Open Access 2020 Initiative pursues this transformation process by converting resources currently spent on journal subscriptions into funds to support sustainable OA business models.

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