“OA Agreements at ISU

Iowa State University’s OA Agreements are contracts and memberships that the University library manages to expand OA publishing options for ISU researchers. The first of our OA agreements was made in 2019 with De Gruyter, a German publisher with more than “900 journals in the humanities, social sciences, medicine, mathematics, engineering, computer sciences, natural sciences, and law.” Since then, we have since expanded our efforts to support over 10 individual publishers. These include both full OA journals, like PLOS and Frontiers, and hybrid OA journals like those published by Oxford University Press and Wiley.

Impact of the Agreements

The early impact of the library’s OA agreements was humble, but this changed in 2020, as more researchers across campus came to learn about these agreements through the University Library’s marketing and a new Open Scholarship Services website highlighting the publishers covered. That year, the library’s agreements supported the publication of more than 200 journal articles from ISU faculty, with nearly half of those articles coming from the departments of animal science or the College of Veterinary Medicine. This is due in large part to our agreements with Oxford University Press and Frontiers, which support excellent journals in the areas of animal science, genetics, and veterinary science. Other departments seeing noticeable support from our agreements include chemistry, agronomy, entomology, and ecology, evolution and organismal biology (EEOB).

Thanks to our new agreement with Wiley and the growing popularity of Frontiers, publishing under the library’s OA arrangements is on track in 2021 to more than double our 2020 output. A breakdown of our expected OA publishing output can be seen in Table 1….”