Category: news

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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The Open Access movement has received an enormous boost today with the launch of Science Europe’s 10 principles of Plan S, devised by Robert-Jan Smits, the Open Access Envoy of the European Commission. Already 11 national research funding organisations have agreed to implement the 10 principles of Plan S in a coordinated way, forming cOAlition S, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC).

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Thanks to the great support from the workshop participants, the ESAC Initiative is happy to publish the final report of the 3^rd ESAC workshop held in Munich last month, “On the effectiveness of APCs”: http://esac-initiative.org/activities/3rd-esac-workshop-munich-28-29-june-2018/

While a significant portion of open access journals operate on independent funding mechanisms, the Article Processing Charge (APC), originally pioneered by BioMed Central as a means to secure the financial viability of journals, has grown to be one of the most prevalent business models in open access publishing, adopted by well-established pure open access publishers such as PLoS, MDPI, Hindawi, Frontiers and beyond. With the steady growth of open access publishing in recent years, particularly by traditional subscription publishers via hybrid article publishing options, born-OA journals such as Nature Communications and Scientific Reports, and transformative agreements (ie offsetting, publish and read, etc.) the need for close monitoring and control of processes, standards and workflows related to Article Processing Charges (APCs) has become crucial. Through such work academic and research libraries have the opportunity and, indeed, the responsibility to exercise oversight and management of APCs to ensure the best interests of their researchers and institutions are served.

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