Category Archives: oa.oa2020

16th Berlin Open Access Conference: Together for Transformation

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“16th BERLIN OPEN ACCESS CONFERENCE TOGETHER FOR TRANSFORMATION

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the seminal Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. With the 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)….”

Global equity in OA publishing workshops – OA2020

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“Authors, globally, publish a large proportion of their research articles in scholarly journals that charge fees for open access. With fee-based open access publishing growing rapidly, there is increasing concern around equity.

It is important to identify the financial barriers that authors encounter and hear the challenges they face, particularly in resource-limited contexts, in order to develop actionable plans and practical mechanisms that ensure no author is limited in their opportunity to publish their accepted articles open access in the journals of their choice. For example:

How can discounts and waiver programs be adjusted to enable more equitable access to open access publishing for authors, as a short-term strategy?
What actions could foster open access publishing fees that are differentiated globally?
What can funders, ministries and research administrators do to understand just how much money they are directing, collectively, to scholarly publishing? How can the global community assess the distribution of such funds and their impact, particularly for researchers in different resource contexts?

 

This workshop will be an opportunity for those who fund and produce research, including scientists and scholars, research administrators, libraries and library consortia, university leadership, science councils and grant funders, and ministries of research and education, to better understand the current tensions in the scholarly communication landscape and explore immediate and long-term actions they each can take to ensure open access publishing is delivered in accordance with these principles:…”

ATG Interviews Colleen Campbell, Coordinator of the OA2020 and ESAC Initiatives, Max Planck Digital Library – Charleston Hub

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“Rather than framing open access as a movement, I prefer to talk about open access as a logical and necessary evolution in scholarly communication.  Living through the COVID-19 pandemic, I think there is no doubt in anyone’s mind of the value in openly sharing scholarly knowledge nor of the urgency with which authoritative knowledge should be shared.  The process of science hinges upon sharing, discussing, challenging and reproducing the results of research, and for that process to function optimally, research results need to reach the widest audience possible. 

Researchers today heavily rely on journals to provide the scholarly communication services of organized criticism and dissemination of their results, but the subscription business model that underlies the bulk of scholarly journals is actually creating drag on the advancement of science.  What I find compelling is to consider what researchers could accomplish if they were able to finally interact with an open corpus of peer-reviewed research, instead of limiting their interactions to those journals their libraries happen to be able to subscribe to this year. ”

The DEAL cost modeling tool – DEAL Operations

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“The DEAL agreements provide a framework to orient institutional investments around open dissemination of research, but budgeting for the open access publishing needs of researchers can be challenging for stakeholders. While previous library subscription fees are known, the entity of investments in open access publishing of articles (APCs) before the DEAL agreements is, in most cases, unknown, as publishing trends of authors were not previously tracked and payments were largely made outside of central oversight.

The DEAL Cost Modeling Tool is an interactive, Excel-based tool that addresses this challenge, giving every institution the means to calculate their total costs with the publishers Wiley and Springer Nature and assess the financial impact of the DEAL agreements on the immediate and long-term, in a variety of cost scenarios.”

The DEAL Cost Modeling Tool

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Abstract:  The DEAL Cost Modeling Tool is a practical tool that gives German research institutions the ability to calculate their medium-term expenditure development with the publishers Wiley and Springer Nature under various assumptions and compare these with the actual costs of the DEAL agreements. The interactive Excel tool, which is equipped with a wide range of input and modeling options, incorporates publication and financial data from Germany from the years prior to the DEAL contracts and a robust methodology to generate projections that illustrate potential cost developments under a selection of relevant scenarios. Anchored in the validated article-level cost data generated through the DEAL agreements, the DEAL Cost Modeling Tool makes a practical contribution to the discourse on evaluation of impact and costs associated with  transformative open access publishing agreements as they proliferate globally, prompted by consensus around the OA2020 Initiative and widely documented in the ESAC Registry,

Transformative Agreements and Institutional Open Access Policies, Principles, and Strategies

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“In March 2021 the University of California announced a four-year transformative agreement with Elsevier covering reading access and open-access publishing for UC authors. While there continues to be significant discussion over the merits of UC’s approach, one aspect of this agreement that has not been widely discussed is how it relates to UC’s open access policies for research articles written by anyone employed by UC.

Given the great interest in UC’s agreement and policies, this event will focus on helping attendees understand the mechanics of UC’s approach to furthering open access to scholarship. Ellen Finnie, Open Access Publisher Agreements Manager for the UC Office of Scholarly Communication, will provide a brief presentation on the interaction of the transformative agreement and UC’s OA policies, principles, and strategies, followed by plenty of time for discussion.

This event is co-sponsored by the OA2020 US Working Group and Community of Practice and the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI). All are welcome to attend.”

Stakeholder alignment in preparation for negotiating open access agreements

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“This Community of Practice Call is coordinated by the US OA2020 Working Group for library faculty and staff who wish to learn and share knowledge around the practical aspects of Negotiating and Implementing OA and Transformative Agreements. This third session will focus on strategies to secure stakeholder alignment around transformative and open access agreements.

With the open access transition ushering in a new paradigm in scholarly publishing, the calls are intended to be an opportunity to ask questions, offer expertise garnered through experience, and build a culture of information-sharing within the library community around elements such as stakeholder alignment, data gathering and analysis, library workflows, budgeting, staff organization, metadata standards, value assessment criteria and more….”

OA2020 Progress Report

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“To date, the OA2020 expression of interest in the Large scale implementation of Open Access to scholarly Journals has been signed by more than 140 research organizations representing over 4600 institutions from all regions….

A large number of our participants have made great strides in data gathering and analysis to understand publishing trends, track subscription and publishing expenditures, and cost-model transition scenarios. To support these efforts, a Open Access 2020 dataset has been released, enabling organizations to freely conduct analyses to better understand the volume and publisher share of the scholarly journal articles by corresponding authors from their country’s institutions, an essential step in preparing for a fully open access future….

Following the Final Statement of the 14th Berlin Open Access Conference which validated Transformative Agreements as a viable and effective method to accelerate the transition to open access, uptake of this strategy has grown considerably. The ESAC Registry of Transformative Agreements now counts more than 130 such agreements, negotiated in 19 different countries with 32 publishers large and small, leading to the publication of nearly 90,000 articles immediately open access in 2020….”

Establishing tender procedures and competition within the framework of national library consortia for open access journals | National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE

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“The open access transformation is a declared goal of the Coalition S and the OA2020 initiative and the institutions supporting them. In order to achieve a large-scale open access transformation of journals, as many established subscription journals as possible shall be transformed into open access. To achieve this goal, transformative agreements are concluded such as those the DEAL project has been negotiating for several years with the three major international scientific publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley). In Germany, the 13+ group established by the “Alliance of Science Organisations” Working Group “Scientific Publication System” is aiming at similar negotiations with further thirteen large publishing houses. In addition, the DFG programme “Open Access Transformation Agreements” provides funding for transformative agreements.

The existing transformative agreements do not include mechanisms for the definitive flipping of journals into open access and no mechanisms to limit cost increases in the long term, as demanded by the European Commission and the European University Association, for example. Indeed, APC-based, genuine open access journals also lack mechanisms for the long-term limitation of cost increases. The price caps currently implemented in the (DFG-funded) publication funds are of limited suitability. On the one hand, they are too high for the mass of open access journals; on the other hand, they are set too low for highly selective and high-quality open access journals that are attractive to many researchers.

Against this background, we suggest to conclude pure open access contracts and, if applicable, contract components for pure open access journals within the framework of transformative agreements by tendering in secret bidding procedures as practiced by SCOAP³. The now published concept describes the intended objectives, the services to be put out to tender and a proposal for organisational implementation.

The following points summarise the objectives of the concept:

Establishing price and service competition between publishers by means of centralised tendering.
Reduction of the average article costs for consortia within the framework of open access contracts to the level of SCOAP³.
Clear definition of the services to be provided by the publishers.
Structural anchoring of APC funding for affiliated scientists….”

Taking the Temperature on Open Access Among UC Berkeley Faculty | Ithaka S+R

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“To promote a publishing ecosystem where the impact of research can be maximized by removing readership barriers, the UC Berkeley Library is making many efforts to push for open access publishing, including signing the OA2020 Expression of Interest and terminating our Elsevier journal subscriptions. But what are our faculty’s opinions on these issues? The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey gave us an opportunity to take the temperature of Berkeley faculty’s attitudes on open access.

Do Berkeley faculty support open access? The short answer is yes….”

UC Santa Cruz joins the international effort to make research accessible to all

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“In June, the University of California Santa Cruz joined its sister UC campuses in taking an important step towards the goal of making all scholarly journal literature freely available to the world by endorsing the international open access (OA) initiative, OA2020. Led by the Max Planck Digital Library, OA2020 is a global alliance committed to new models of scholarly publishing that ensure outputs are open and re-usable and that the costs behind their dissemination are transparent and economically sustainable.

By adding its name to the list of 136 signatory organizations, UCSC demonstrates its strong commitment to the values the UC Academic Senate has held since the adoption of its Open Access Policy in 2013. Further, it emphasizes our campus’s support of the Senate-wide UCOLASC’s Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication and the UC Systemwide Library And Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC) call to action aimed at transforming how the UC Libraries approach journal negotiations….”

São Paulo Statement on Open Access | National Research Foundation

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“The representatives of African Open Science Platform, AmeLICA, cOAlition S, OA2020, and SciELO – five of the major worldwide Open Access initiatives – met on 01 May 2019 during the annual meeting of the Global Research Council (GRC) in Sao Paulo. They are united in their common mission of making knowledge available and accessible wherever it can have the greatest impact and help solve humanity’s challenges regardless of where it was produced.

The combined effect of the five initiatives has generated a new momentum in the push towards universal, full and immediate Open Access.

The Five Initiatives jointly state that:

  • They consider that scholarly and scientific knowledge is a global public good. When generated by public funds, free access to it is a universal right.
  • They share one common ultimate objective: providing universal, unrestricted, and immediate Open Access to scholarly information, including use and re-use by humans and machines.
  • They share the belief that this common goal can be achieved through a variety of approaches.
  • They will pursue points of alignment among their approaches and ways to co-operate towards reaching the shared objective.
  • They seek an active dialogue with all stakeholders, including researchers, research funders, universities, libraries, publishers, learned societies, governments, and citizens to take into account the diversity of the global scholarly community….”

OA2020 and cOAlition S Launch Joint Statement | Plan S

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“One of several pathways pursued by OA2020 participants is to negotiate transformative agreements under which the funds previously spent for subscriptions are repurposed to cover the costs associated with open access publishing. This approach enables a swift and efficient transition to open access, in which ‘hybrid’ publishing models can be included to increase the proportion of articles published open access— without paying twice for services relating to one piece of content.

Institutions who engage in such agreements will contribute to delivering the greatest possible range in Plan S-compliant publishing options to their authors while significantly growing the proportion of research made openly available. At the same time, cOAlition S recognizes the importance, as one of three routes towards full and immediate open access, of those agreements in providing a strong incentive for scholarly publishers who have yet to pilot open access models. Publishers will find institutions and consortia willing to partner on such agreements in exchange for a commitment to a definitive transition to full and immediate open access with fair and transparent pricing. Neither the cOAlition S funders nor the OA2020 partners intend to pay for open access publishing in hybrid subscription journals outside such transformative agreements….”

OA2020 and cOAlition S Launch Joint Statement | Plan S

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“One of several pathways pursued by OA2020 participants is to negotiate transformative agreements under which the funds previously spent for subscriptions are repurposed to cover the costs associated with open access publishing. This approach enables a swift and efficient transition to open access, in which ‘hybrid’ publishing models can be included to increase the proportion of articles published open access— without paying twice for services relating to one piece of content.

Institutions who engage in such agreements will contribute to delivering the greatest possible range in Plan S-compliant publishing options to their authors while significantly growing the proportion of research made openly available. At the same time, cOAlition S recognizes the importance, as one of three routes towards full and immediate open access, of those agreements in providing a strong incentive for scholarly publishers who have yet to pilot open access models. Publishers will find institutions and consortia willing to partner on such agreements in exchange for a commitment to a definitive transition to full and immediate open access with fair and transparent pricing. Neither the cOAlition S funders nor the OA2020 partners intend to pay for open access publishing in hybrid subscription journals outside such transformative agreements….”

São Paulo Statement on Open Access

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“The representatives of African Open Science Platform, AmeLICA, cOAlition S, OA2020, and SciELO – five of the major worldwide Open Access initiatives – met on 1 May 2019 during the annual meeting of the Global Research Council in São Paulo, Brazil. They are united in their common mission of making knowledge available and accessible wherever it can have the greatest impact and help solve humanity’s challenges regardless of where it was produced. The combined effect of the five initiatives has generated a new momentum in the push towards universal, full, and immediate Open Access….”