Abstract: Library-funded open access publishing support at Iowa State University has been growing and has required finding scalable solutions to processes, incorporating new tools, and developing effective workflows. This article is based on a NC Serials Conference presentation that provided insights into the Library’s approach to managing author participation in open access deals with publishers.
Rowan University has seen rapid expansion in terms of enrollments, undergraduate and graduate programs, and research activity over the last decade and has grown from a state college into Rowan University. It is a unique academic institution in that it is one of only three in the United States with both allopathic and osteopathic medical schools. Its acquisition of the Rowan School of Osteopathic Medicine and establishment of the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University were significant factors in the university’s research-intensive Carnegie classification R3 in 2017 and R2 classification in 2018 respectively.
“The recent launch of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) has attracted both plaudits (e.g. here and here) and criticism (e. g. here and here).
What is COPE? It is a call to universities and research funding agencies to “recognise the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access [OA] to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents.”
Signatories to COPE are asked to commit to, “the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”
Specifically, signatories are invited to create Gold OA Funds to assist researchers to pay to publish their papers in OA journals — which instead of charging readers to read (via a subscription), impose an author-side article processing fee (APC). The deal is that by paying a fee an author can ensure that the publisher will make his or her paper freely available on the Web for anyone to read, and thereby increase its impact.
COPE is the brain child of Harvard’s Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science, and director of the university’s Office for Scholarly Communication. Shieber outlined the thinking behind COPE in an article published in August in PLoS Biology. COPE is necessary, he explained, because OA journal publishing is currently “at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional [subscription, or Toll Access (TA)] model”.
The implication is that authors would be willing to publish their papers in an OA journal, if someone else was prepared to pay the associated publishing fee.
Universities need to support OA publishing, concluded Shieber, in order for it to become “a sustainable, efficient system”. Only then, he added, can the two journal publishing systems (OA and TA) “compete on a more level playing field.”
To date five universities have signed up to COPE, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, University of California at Berkeley, and Dartmouth University. …”
“The University of Groningen is launching a stimulus fund to support diamond open access initiatives by UG/UMCG researchers. The fund can be used to expand and improve existing initiatives (e.g. professionalizing or scaling-up a scholar-led journal, etc.) or to create new ones (e.g. setting up a new journal or flipping an existing journal to diamond open access)….”
“Higher education institutions must manage open access funds, track research outputs across the publication lifecycle, as well as meeting funders’ open research policies.?These resource intensive activities pose challenges across the sector. Our new product tackles this head on….
The product will include a publication database, reporting suite, transitional agreement log, analytics dashboard, and more. It will provide a platform that centralises major workflow components and streamlines open access management….”
“In March 2009, MIT faculty passed one of the country’s first open access policies; the policy covers their scholarly articles by default.
As of April 2017, all MIT authors, including students, postdocs, and staff, can “opt-in” to an open access license. See below for information on how to deposit a paper, get download statistics on your papers, or opt out of the policy. Authors covered by the MIT faculty open access policy do not need to sign this license.
MIT faculty OA policy
Text of the 2009 faculty open access policy, as well as definitions of terms that appear in the policy.
MIT authors’ opt-in OA license
Information and FAQs on MIT’s opt-in open access license. Sign the license.
FAQ on MIT’s faculty OA policy
Opt-out of MIT’s OA policies
Automated form to waive the faculty OA policy or authors’ opt-in license for a specific paper. Email oapolicyoptout@mit.edu for more information.
Reader comments on OA articles
This beta site shows what readers around the globe are saying about MIT’s OA policy.
Open access publishing support
Find support for open access publishing, including the OA fund. …”
“At KU Leuven we believe that it is essential to apply library budgets to foster a greater diversity in the market of academic publishing. With this purpose in mind we have founded the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access, which is exclusively devoted to stimulating the development of non-profit and community-led publishers, infrastructures and initiatives. During this presentation I will share some insights about the operation of such a fund, the type of open scholarship infrastructures and OA programmes we support, and explain our decision to cease financing article processing charges, even in a Fair OA business model….”
Utrecht University aims at a publishing climate in which academic authors publish fully open access (OA). The Executive Board of Utrecht University has agreed to a new OA policy to realise this ambition.
“The Open Access Publication Charge (OAPC) initiative was introduced in 2021 to cover the fees for the company’s employees to publish in prominent peer-reviewed veterinary journals, which can cost up to £3,000 per paper.
Funding was approved for 29 employees to have their work published in eight journals last year, covering topics such as canine mast cell tumours, imaging of canine intracranial intra-axial haemorrhages, electrochemotherapy as a treatment option for feline nasal melanoma and antimicrobial use in female canine urinary tract infections.
The OAPC scheme has now been extended with a fund of at least £30,000 available this year….”
Abstract: As main buyers of scholarly literature, research libraries have always provided essential economic support for sustaining the market of academic publishing. With the switch to open access (OA), libraries are now faced with transitioning this support from the demand (subscriptions) to the supply (publications) side. The way in which this is currently done, in general, risks strengthening the preponderance of the for-profit approach to scholarly communication. We therefore believe that it is essential to apply library budgets to foster a greater diversity. That is exactly the purpose of the Fund for Fair Open Access, set up by KU Leuven Libraries in 2018, which is exclusively devoted to stimulating the development of non-profit and community-led initiatives. This is achieved by library memberships to sustain open scholarship infrastructure, by supporting diamond OA programmes and by subsidizing OA books published by Leuven University Press. In this article, we will demonstrate the accomplished successes of the fund and share some insights we have gathered along the way, such as our decision to cease financing article processing charges, even in a Fair OA business model.
“Some of the popular open access transition strategies, mostly promoted by publishers, manage to achieve more open access. But they lack much of what we need: making publishing accessible for everyone, lowering the costs of publishing, coping with an increasing number of publications, reducing the dependency on commercial publishers, transparency of procedures and costs, and a sustainable and irrevocable flipping of journals to open access [undefined]. The goal of achieving open access as the standard in academic publishing has been set for years now. Who do we trust with accelerating the speed of the transition while assuring the inclusiveness, transparency, and sustainability of the publication system? Clear principles must be reconciled with the will to break new ground. Libraries are in a good position to shape this transition to open….
Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) has the mandate to provide both academia and industry with information from natural sciences and engineering. The library is strongly committed to openness in its mission. Measures include providing access to scholarly literature, deploying infrastructure, and conducting research. In terms of open access, TIB is deeply involved in defining concepts and tools that actively help shape the transition to full open access. In this post, I will give a short overview of the current activities of TIB….
At TIB, there are four major strategies underway, all based on the clear commitment to help shape the transition:
We established a library publishing service, TIB Open Publishing, to offer professional publishing services for non-APC, scholar-led open access journals and conference proceedings.
We developed our leading role in traditional library consortia by establishing models for open access consortia, e.g. through the KOALA project.
We contribute to collectively funded open access publications and systematically integrate this into our acquisition budget.
We help sustain open infrastructure for the open access landscape….”
NOVEMBER 18, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC
Structuring the Institutional Open Access Fund management: managing APCs with Oable
“Open Access is growing, yet institutions managing individual APCs and paying for these know this can be a burden. Wrong invoices, managing multiple Excel sheets, unstructured data from forms and more issues arise. Oable is a solution developed by Knowledge Unlatched which addresses these issues and helps institutions streamline their workflows to simplify the management and publication process….”
“The Tulane Supporting Impactful Publications (SIP) assists in covering fees to support open access options for high impact peer-reviewed publications for Tulane scholars serving as corresponding authors who do not have grant or other funds available to cover them. This program is funded and coordinated by the Office of Academic Affairs and Provost and co-funded by the Office of Academic Affairs and Tulane Libraries and Academic Information Resources. …
Eligible applicants may apply for funds once a peer reviewed journal article has been accepted for publication in a journal with impact factor of 8 or above. Applications for journals with impact factors <8 will also be considered for funding when the corresponding author provides a compelling case to do so. One application may be submitted per eligible publication….”
An extended regulation regarding the absorption of open-?access fees on the part of the ETH Library has been in force since February 2021. This will be subject to a limit from the closing of the accounts in December 2021 onwards.
“Calls to align incentives in academia to promote open research practices are not new. However, in recent years research funders are increasingly implementing policies and schemes designed to promote open science practices amongst researchers. In this post, Maria Cruz and Hans de Jonge outline details of the Dutch Research Council’s (NWO) new Open Science Fund, which they suggest is the natural next step towards a culture of open science in Dutch research.”