Category Archives: oa.consortia

Help Shape the Transition to Open · Series 1.3: Global Transition to Open

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“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….”

Bringing Transformative Agreements to a Large Consortium · Series 1.3: Global Transition to Open

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“Transformative agreements (TA), those which move the fee libraries have traditionally paid for read-only subscriptions to publishing content open access, are not new.  Projekt DEAL began negotiations with Elsevier as far back as 2016 with the goal of moving towards a transformative ‘read & publish’ agreement on behalf of all German academic institutions.undefined For the past few years, we have been working on behalf of our institutions and the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) to bring transformative agreements out of the realm of discussion and into action at the consortial level. GWLA members are trying to find a sustainable way to provide access to scholarly research produced and needed by our communities with continual decreases in budgets and resources. This essay discusses our experiences, frustrations, and hopes for the future.”

A Reflection about Equity in Open Access from the Consorcio Colombia | Commonplace, Series 1.3: Global Transition to Open

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To understand how Open Access is considered in Colombia—and in general in Latin America—we have to distinguish between 1) the Green Open Access initiatives; and 2) the Open Access discussions which are derived from APCs and TAs in the gold and hybrid open access routes.

Colombia is a Latin American country considered as one of the middle income countries of the Global South (World Bank, 2021). Since 2017 almost 60 higher education institutions and universities started a collective negotiation of the “big deals” with 5 publishers: Elsevier, Springer, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis and SAGE. This collective negotiation was part of a national strategy that was seeking to overcome the national agreement in Colombia with only one publisher: Elsevier. These 60 institutions formed the Consorcio Colombia group with the logistical operation of Consortia S.A.S and the support of the Colombian Association of Universities (ASCUN), the Ministry of Education (MEN) and the Ministry of Science and Technology (Minciencias), and made a first general negotiation with three principal goals: (i) have a diversification of academic publishers in Colombia, (ii) get discounts and improve equity in access to academic production, especially for smaller academic institutions, and (iii) create a participation space to analyze, discuss and think about new scenarios in scholarly publishing and communication.

The institutions which belong to the Consorcio Colombia belong to all regions of our country and are represented by library directors, vice presidents for academic or vice presidents for research. All the members have an official designation from their academic institutions and the group is characterized by a plural representation that has permitted an important level of engagement and organization. The representation is decided in a general council considering the different types of institutions (universities and research centers) and country regions. A study carried out by the same members of the Consortium allowed the classification of the institutions into 4 groups, according to their size and maturity in research. Each group participates in the Consortium with differentiated prices and scopes. ( Consorcio Colombia, 2021). The Consorcio Colombia has not only functions of negotiation but have also formed 11 commissions with academic and communicative purposes.

Enabling smaller independent publishers to participate in Open Access transformative arrangements | Septentrio Conference Series

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Independent Society Publishers and Academic Publishers would like to enable Open Access transformative agreements, but find it difficult to do this at scale, especially when each library consortia requires different licence agreements, data and workflows. This project is to create shared principles, a model licence, a data template and minimum workflows, so that small publishers, libraries and library consortia can then use them to more easily conclude Open Access agreements.

Springer Nature and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) Announce New Partnership

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Following Springer Nature’s successful transformative agreements (TAs) in Europe and North America, the company is pleased to announce its first TA in the Asia-Pacific region. The agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) will give members of the CAUL consortium the ability to publish their research open access (OA) in over 2000 journals[1], making it CAUL’s largest TA to date.

Collective Governance: an Update from The Open Book Collective Work Package · COPIM

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How should a collective be governed? This was the question that punctum books’ Director Eileen Joy and I took the lead in addressing, in collaboration with our COPIM colleagues and a range of workshop participants. The terms of the question seem almost contradictory: a ‘collective’ implies equity, collegiality, co-operation and a lack of organized hierarchy, whilst ‘governed’ suggests top-down management structures, or the imposition of rules and regulations by a select group over a larger majority. Obviously, the latter model would not be in line with the values of a project we are calling the Open Book Collective – i.e., a consortium that brings together publishers, librarians and other stakeholders in the future of open access monographs via a platform that catalogues, distributes and sustains OA books – yet at the same time, we needed to find a way that the different groups of stakeholders could be effectively organized to work together and get the most out of the platform in a mutually beneficial arrangement. For the purposes of the platform we are building, that means publishers, librarians, scholars, researchers, universities, infrastructure providers, authors, readers and more. The platform needs to respond to a wide range of interests, needs and requirements, even if all of us were committed to the overarching values of sustainable Open Access publishing for monographs.

Central licensing and invoicing deals with PALCI and GWLA, and new participation deadline for Direct to Open from the MIT Press | The MIT Press

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“Today, the MIT Press announced two new consortial relationships with the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI) and the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) for Direct to Open (D2O) and extended the deadline for libraries to commit to support the collective action model to November 30, 2021.

Libraries that commit to support Direct to Open before November 30, 2021 will earn exclusive benefits. They gain immediate, term access to an archive of gated monographs, including classic works from Rosalind Krauss, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, Sherry Turkle, and many more. D2O participating libraries also receive special discounting on the MIT Press’s trade books collection on the MIT Press Direct platform. If D2O does not reach the success threshold for 2022, participating libraries are assured term access to the archive collection without paying the fee. ”

Finland: Follow the Number of OA Articles

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Researchers from Finnish universities and research institutions, can publish their articles open access thanks to the FinELib Consortium agreements. A total of 2929 open articles were published in 2020. The number of open access articles increases as more and more researchers utilise the open access benefits included in the consortium agreements.

You can track the yearly development in the number of open access articles on FinELib’s new web page.

IEEE Reaches a Transformative Open Access Read and Publish Agreement with Finnish Consortium FinELib

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IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and FinELib, a consortium of Finnish universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes, and public libraries, have entered an Open Access Read and Publish agreement. For more information, see https://finelib.fi/iel-agreement. 

Principles and Standards for OA Arrangements Between Libraries/Consortia and Smaller Independent Publishers

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“The transition to Open Access requires change on the part of all stakeholders, and it is particularly crucial that there is active cross-stakeholder alignment focused on enabling smaller independent publishers to transition successfully. In recognition of this, cOAlition S and ALPSP have asked us to convene groups to work on shared principles, data, licenses, and workflows as outlined in our recent report (see https://www.coalition-s.org/open-access-agreements-with-smaller-publishers-require-active-cross-stakeholder-alignment-report-says/).

We are seeking expressions of interest in engaging with this work. Ideally, we would like a diverse array of people knowledgeable about the topic, who can represent their communities and influence working practices, and backed by organisations willing to communicate, champion, implement and maintain the outputs that will emerge from this work….”

Open Science: read our statement – News – CIVIS – A European Civic University

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“CIVIS universities promote the development of new research indicators to complement the conventional indicators for research quality and impact, so as to do justice to open science practices and, going beyond pure bibliometric indicators, to promote also non-bibliometric research products. In particular, the metrics should extend the conventional bibliometric indicators in order to cover new forms of research outputs, such as research data and research software….

Incentives and Rewards for researchers to engage in Open Science activities 

Research career evaluation systems should fully acknowledge open science activities. CIVIS members encourage the inclusion of Open Science practices in their assessment mechanisms for rewards, promotion, and/or tenure, along with the Open Science Career Assessment Matrix….”

Open access publishing and the promise of collaboration · COPIM

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“In the discussions about the merits and demerits of collaboration, what tends to be missed though are the untapped potentials that exist in collaborations not just between academics, or between disciplines, or between academics and external organisations, or between academics and the public, but between academics, scholarly libraries, and publishers of scholarly work. This the subject of a new report co-authored by Elli Gerakopoulou, Izabella Penier and me. It focuses on the possibilities that might exist for collaboration between scholarly libraries and open access book publishers, including the kinds of open access publishers led by academics represented by ScholarLed, one of the partners in the COPIM project and with which I am also involved. The report draws on a combination of interviews, workshop discussions (including one workshop with librarians in the US, one in the UK, and one with publishers), and pre-workshop surveys with librarians and individuals involved in library consortia, as well as desk research.

In the report we examine various forms of collaboration that characterise the existing landscape of open access book publishing. This includes examining library membership programmes, of the kind run by both publishers — examples include programmes run by Lever Press, Luminos, punctum books, and Open Book Publishers — and infrastructure providers — notably the OAPEN library membership programme. We also look at intermediaries that aim to increase the likelihood of open access book publishers being able to receive financial support from scholarly libraries, such as Knowledge Unlatched and TOME. This forms part of a scoping exercise to enable us and our readers to understand the diversity of types of collaboration that already exist between and around open access publishers and scholarly libraries and where there are possibilities to learn from such initiatives….” 

The promise of collaboration: collective funding models and the integration of Open Access books into libraries | Zenodo

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“This report tackles a simple question: how can open access books be more successfully integrated into scholarly libraries? While there are some important practical efforts being made to address this question in a variety of different contexts, we explore the areas where further work is required to progress from a situation in which supporting and integrating open access books often remains a peripheral concern for libraries.

The report draws on desk research alongside a combination of interviews, workshop discussions and pre-workshop surveys with librarians and individuals involved in library consortia. It explores issues such as the discoverability of open access content in library catalogues, the sustainability of open access monograph publishing, the difficulty of articulating the value of open access for supporting universities and the challenge of aligning open access values with those of stakeholders. It also reimagines a more diverse and inclusive system of scholarly communication in relation to open access monographs. As part of this, the report outlines some of the principles that could inform a new open access model/platform aimed at transforming the relationship between open access book publishers and libraries….”