Publishing in compliance with the OSTP Nelson Memo: what we know so far

“The OSTP Nelson Memo was released in August 2022 delivering guidance for all federal grant-making agencies to revise or develop public access policies to ensure free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research. Where are we now over a year later and how can researchers get ready for when the public access policies are implemented?

In this webinar, Boyana Konforti (Director of Strategic Initiatives, F1000), Rebecca Grant (Head of Data & Software Publishing, F1000), and Andrew Bostjancic (US Open Research Policy Manager, Taylor & Francis Group) discuss how getting to grips with open science practices can help researchers prepare to share their federally funded research outputs. Register now to join the session, where you’ll uncover: ? The key points of the Nelson Memo ? How open access publishing works ? The benefits of diversifying your research output now ? Open science and open data best practices ? Case studies on how openness drives real-world impact…”

Taylor & Francis Launches New Open Access Books Initiative with Jisc Agreement for UK Institutions – Taylor & Francis Newsroom

“Taylor & Francis announces a new international collective funding pilot, Pledge to Open, which aims to publish 70 open access (OA) books on a broad range of global issues, including climate change, mental health, women’s rights, and race.

All higher education institutions in the UK can take part in the OA scheme thanks to an agreement struck with Jisc, the UK’s higher education library consortium.

Institutions can support one or more of seven interdisciplinary themed collections, each comprising 10 frontlist research books. If funding targets are met, the books will be published open access for everyone to read online, download and share….”

Pledge to Open Pilot – Librarian Resources

“Taylor & Francis is delighted to announce the launch of ‘Pledge to Open’, a new collaborative funding open access books initiative, in conjunction with Jisc and other international member partners, to ensure the widest possible dissemination and impact of our research book titles. The ‘Pledge to Open’ pilot aims to transform 70 front list research book titles into open access….

Participating institutions can choose which collection or collections they would like to pledge for and pay a one-off fee per collection to support its transformation to open access. In return, they receive perpetual unlimited multi-user access for the titles of the collections they pledge for, irrespective of any funding thresholds being met for this pilot….”

BREAKING NEWS – Editorial resignation and new Journal of Critical Public Health established – CPHN

Editorial Board of prestigious, international peer-reviewed scholarly journal Critical Public Health to part ways from owner and publisher, Taylor & Francis: “Fundamentally different perspectives” over the role and process of scholarly publishing cited as the reason.

Resignation Letter – CPHN

“We, the undersigned members of the Critical Public Health Editorial Board, hereby resign with immediate effect….

Members of the Editorial Board provide unpaid labour to maintain Critical Public Health as a platform for critical scholarship. We do this as service to the larger critical public health academic and practitioner community, and with respect for the collective input of colleagues who founded and published our predecessor, Radical Community Medicine. 

As a 2021 editorial in CPH noted, we believe that a journal can be “both a brand, with a value indicated by the impact factor and the level of income it can generate for a corporate publisher [and] the home of a community of scholars”. However, over the last year or so, it has become increasingly difficult to hold together these two different versions of the journal as Taylor & Francis seek to increase standardisation and efficiency across their titles. 

 

The new contract and amendment issued to the editors make clear the limited role the publisher sees for the editorial team and board. In reiterating the rights of the publisher to determine the funding model and volume of articles that will be published, we believe Taylor & Francis have significantly eroded our ability to set strategic direction….

The only model offered for ensuring authors can publish open access has been Article Processing Charges (APCs), currently £2700 per research article: an unsustainable cost for research funders and university libraries in high income countries, and an impossible cost for many in less advantaged countries; occasional subsidies do not constitute a viable solution to the much deeper issues of inequity embedded within the profit orientation….”

BREAKING NEWS – Editorial resignation and new Journal of Critical Public Health established – CPHN

“Editorial Board of prestigious, international peer-reviewed scholarly journal Critical Public Health to part ways from owner and publisher, Taylor & Francis: “Fundamentally different perspectives” over the role and process of scholarly publishing cited as the reason….

While the relationship has reached its end, the community will live on in another form. Authors and readers are invited to join the new community at https://cphn.net….”

Critical Public Health Editorial Board resignation – FAQs – CPHN

“CPH was ‘my’ journal for critical work: where should I submit to now?

We hope you will support the new journal, the Journal of Critical Public Health (JCPH). JCPH is hosted by the University of Calgary and is owned and published by the UK-based CPHN. This should now be up and running, supported by 44 members of the ex-CPH editorial board, with an aim of publishing its first content in around year.

How will the new journal be funded?

JCPH has no funding at present: it has been set up and will run initially with volunteer labour from members of the existing Editorial Board and colleagues, pro-bono admin help, and small donations. We will be offering diamond open access – that is, there will be no fees to publish in the journal, and no costs to read it. This may not be sustainable longer term: there are costs to publishing, and the consultation (see below) will include possible funding models….”

Significant Acceleration of Humanities and Social Sciences Open Access Through Taylor & Francis and Jisc Transformative Agreement – Taylor & Francis Newsroom

“The power of transformative agreements (TAs) to drive the transition to open access (OA), especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, is revealed in a new report published by Taylor & Francis. Accelerating open access in the UK explores in detail the first two years of Taylor & Francis’ OA partnership with the Jisc consortium and how it has boosted the global impact of research from UK institutions.

Supporting Humanities and Social Sciences researchers to publish OA

One of the report’s standout findings is the benefit of the TA for Humanities and Social Science (HSS) researchers. In the last two years, 7,900 articles by HSS authors at participating UK institutions were published OA in Taylor & Francis journals, more than six times the number in 2019-20. This is a significant result because HSS researchers usually find it harder to publish open access, having less OA funding than their peers in STEM….”

Global Open Access Initiative, SCOAP3, Drives Dramatic Increase in Reach and Readership of Taylor & Francis Books – Taylor & Francis Newsroom

The pilot phase of SCOAP3 for Books has demonstrated the power of open access to help authors boost the readership and reach of their books. The average annual usage of the 19 Taylor & Francis titles in the pilot leapt by over 3,000% for 2021 and 2022, compared with the usage in the three years before they were converted to OA. Open access also made these titles available in regions where library budgets are limited, resulting in a five-fold increase in the average number of countries accessing the content.

The Scholarly Fingerprinting Industry

Abstract:  Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and SAGE: Many researchers know that the five giant firms publish most of the world’s scholarship. Fifty years of acquisitions and journal launches have yielded a stunningly profitable oligopoly, built up from academics’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor. Their business is a form of IP rentiership—collections of title-by-title prestige monopolies that, in the case of Nature or The Lancet, underwrite a stable of spinoff journals on the logic of the Hollywood franchise. Less well-known is that Elsevier and its peers are layering a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations, fueled by data extraction. They are packaging researcher behavior, gleaned from their digital platforms, into prediction products, which they sell back to universities and other clients. Their raw material is scholars’ citations, abstracts, downloads, and reading habits, repurposed into dashboard services that, for example, track researcher productivity. Elsevier and the other oligopolist firms are fast becoming, in other words, surveillance publishers . And they are using the windfall profits from their existing APC-and-subscription business to finance their moves into predictive analytics.

 

Taylor & Francis to Pilot First Transparent Peer Review Model for a Higher Education Research Journal | STM Publishing News

“The quality and integrity of peer review in Higher Education research has been put firmly in the spotlight by the European Journal of Higher Education (EJHE), published by Taylor & Francis. All articles submitted from April 2023 will, if accepted, have their reviewer reports published at the same time, as part of a one-year pilot.

The EJHE peer review process itself will remain the same, with reports on manuscripts under consideration received from two or three referees before an editorial decision is made. However, when an article is published on Taylor & Francis Online, a link will be included to an open access report containing the anonymous peer reviews from all rounds of review. Authors and reviewers will be made aware of the policy before they submit an article or agree to review….”

Bibliosan and Taylor & Francis Agree New Read & Publish Partnership – Taylor & Francis Newsroom

“Bibliosan, the Italian network of biomedical research libraries, and Taylor & Francis have announced a new three-year open access agreement which will significantly extend the reach and impact of research at the 70 participating institutions.

Under the read & publish agreement, articles accepted by a Taylor & Francis Open Select (hybrid) journal will be eligible for open access publication if they have a corresponding author based at one of the Bibliosan institutions….”

Tokyo Institute of Technology Partners With Taylor & Francis in New Read and Publish Agreement | STM Publishing News

“Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and Taylor & Francis have announced a new three-year transformative partnership to increase the publication of open access (OA) articles by researchers at the leading science and technology institution.

Under the agreement, articles with a corresponding author based at Tokyo Tech will receive funding support to publish OA in Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open Select (hybrid) journals.

Tokyo Tech is the first member of the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) to opt in to a new ‘read & publish’ deal negotiated by the consortium. The agreement also ensures Tokyo Tech users can continue to read all the Taylor & Francis journals the library subscribed to in 2022….”

Taylor & Francis Becomes the Newest Supporter of Open Pharma | STM Publishing News

“Open Pharma and Taylor & Francis are delighted to announce that Taylor & Francis has become the latest official Supporter of the Open Pharma initiative…

Today‘s announcement that Taylor & Francis has become an official Supporter of Open Pharma reflects the fact that the two organizations share the same commitment to connecting pharma with innovations in publishing to increase transparency and access to research outputs.

These shared values were illustrated in 2021, when Open Pharma published their recommendations for plain language summaries of peer-reviewed medical journal publications in the Taylor & Francis journal Current Medical Research and Opinion (CMRO).* One of more than 2700 peer-reviewed journals published by Taylor & Francis, Open Pharma selected CMRO because of its complete range of open access options and its commitment to publishing innovations and research in medical and scientific publishing….:

T&F copyright advice. Author, beware. | Plan S

“The information provided by T&F, whilst having a veneer of assisting authors, is nothing of the sort. The nub of the matter is, T&F wants the author’s rights so they can own and control the content of the article. This does not seem right to me – the researcher should own and control the content that they created, based on the discoveries they made, and that were paid for by others such as taxpayers, a funder, or an institution – not the publisher. 

An author may well want a publisher to carry out valuable services, such as copyediting, etc, and they should be paid for those services. This does not mean they should own and control the content. It is, therefore, imperative that authors retain their rights so they can: 

Make and distribute any print or digital copies of the content they wish 
Distribute print or digital copies to any lecture, class, conference or other group, commercial or non-commercial, as they wish
Share copies of and content from their article with whomever they choose (the entire world if wanted), whenever they choose, using whatever channel they choose.
Use their articles in any other works they create as they wish, whether dissertation, thesis, or anything else
Post their accepted manuscript wherever they choose, whenever they choose, whether their institution’s repository or a commercial academic network such as ResearchGate.

T&F is not alone in imposing such restrictions. Similar restrictions abound in other publishers’ terms and conditions. My recommendations: 

Authors: Be aware; Read the terms and conditions carefully before signing 
Researchers: Most importantly, retain your rights in line with advice from UNESCO, European Universities Association (EUA), Global Young Academy (GYA), LIBER and here, and others.
Universities: step up to the plate and support your researchers, so they don’t have to deal with unacceptable and complex terms and conditions – adopt an institutional authors’ rights retention policy as soon as possible (see numerous examples on cOAlition S blog)…”