Category Archives: oa.coalition_s

Beyond article-based charges: working group established | Plan S

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“cOAlition S, in partnership with Jisc and PLOS, are delighted to announce the establishment of a multi-stakeholder working group, tasked to identify business models and arrangements that enable equitable participation in knowledge-sharing.

Following an open call for applicants, we received over 60 high-quality applications. After a thorough review process, with a focus on ensuring that the group represents a diverse range of stakeholders who are committed to supporting a more equitable publishing business model, we are pleased to announce that the following organisations have been invited to join the group.”

The Urgent Need to Reform Research Publishing: A Call to the G20 | Center For Global Development | Ideas to Action

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“There are three specific issues that could be taken up by the G20: 

Endorsement of cOAlition S: While initial efforts may have facilitated a shift towards a pay-to-publish model that does not work for most of the world, cOAlition S remains the most promising vehicle for reform and is actively exploring alternative models from emerging economies.

Championing equitable funding: There will be costs to infrastructure that is likely to be needed for research publishing reforms. This necessitates innovative and equitable funding mechanisms that ensure all researchers, irrespective of their geographical location or institutional affiliation, can publish their work Open Access.

Policy harmonization: G20 is a high-level political platform and may not be the right forum for negotiating comprehensive Open Access policies. But if the G20 nations were to endorse specific Open Access policy positions, it would provide direction for national and multilateral initiatives.

There is a window of opportunity. India, which holds the G20 presidency, is already lighting a path by putting research publishing on the agenda of several G20 engagement groups. These groups, particularly the Chief Scientific Advisers Roundtable, can seize the moment and harness the influence of the G20 to pursue effective, efficient, and equitable research publishing. They would do well to work with leaders from Brazil and South Africa, who will hold the presidency in 2024 and 2025 respectively, to ensure momentum for reform is sustained.

Plan S: Stay the course – Research Professional News

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“Let’s look at some data. Out of the four million scientific papers that are published each year, some 61 per cent are still behind subscription paywalls. In the medical field, progress has been utterly slow. Only 31 per cent of all cancer-related publications are openly accessible. For cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases, these figures are respectively 20 and 16 per cent. And in the field of climate change, which is such a big challenge for our planet, only 40 per cent of all publications are in open access.

Now, why has there not been more progress? I see several reasons for this.

First of all, there are still some people out there who believe that open access is tantamount to predatory journals with little quality oversight, and there are others who deliberately keep this myth alive.

Secondly, many academic libraries are locked by subscription budgets and cannot afford to liberate funds for open access. In other words, the flip from ‘pay to read’ to ‘pay to publish’ is complex.

Third, there is much criticism on both the side of the science community and that of the funders that the costs of publishing articles in open access—article-processing costs, or APCs—are just too high. This is also a kind of myth since, for example, ‘gold’ open access provides much better value for money than subscription. While the costs of subscription range between €4,000 and €9,500 per article, the costs of open-access publishing APCs is on average €2,500 per article, although there are of course exceptional cases whereby APCs of almost €9,000 are charged. Yet it has to be acknowledged that over recent years there has been an inflation of APCs.

And fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the transformative agreements mentioned above have not yet delivered and in many cases are not really transformative….”

 

Introducing the Hybrid Open Access Dashboard (HOAD) | Plan S

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We are pleased to introduce the Hybrid Open Access Dashboard (HOAD), an openly available data analytics tool designed for academic libraries and their consortia. Developed at the State and University Library Göttingen and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), HOAD combines open data from Crossref, OpenAlex, and the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool. By doing so, the dashboard illustrates the ongoing transition of hybrid journal portfolios included in transformative agreements to full open access.

How does it work?

HOAD provides interactive charts and tables for exploring the openness of over 12,500 hybrid journals included in 400+ transformative agreements. These are derived from curated and publicly available cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool data. HOAD allows users to gain a general overview and analyse hybrid journal portfolios of selected publishers. Throughout the dashboard, users can compare the global hybrid journal landscape with the situation in Germany since 2017.

As an important aspect, users can explore hybrid open access across Creative Commons licences over time and compare licence types offered by publishers. Notably, Springer Nature journals predominantly adopted the CC BY licence, aligned with the preferences of Plan S, whereas Elsevier and Wiley hybrid journals still use the more restrictive CC BY-NC-ND licence for a substantial share of articles (see Figure).

Users can also explore variations in open access adoption among different countries. The view on the top productive countries shows that lead authors from the United States, China, and India published open access in hybrid journals to a much lesser extent compared to their European counterparts. In contrast, countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Germany have achieved substantially larger open access shares, likely due to the wide implementation of transformative agreements.

Another important aspect assessed by HOAD is the availability of openly accessible metadata. Users can identify publishers that provide comprehensive metadata for their open access articles via Crossref. The metadata assessment includes open licences, abstracts, information about Text and Data Mining (TDM), authors’ ORCID, and funding. By highlighting gaps, HOAD supports library consortia in monitoring and negotiating improvements for open metadata in transformative agreements.

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Accelerating open access: cOAlition S takes bold action to propel change – The Publication Plan for everyone interested in medical writing, the development of medical publications, and publication planning

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“KEY TAKEAWAYS

cOAlition S plans to drop 1,589 titles from its transformative journal programme due to insufficient progress towards open access.
The move highlights the growing importance of accelerating the shift to open access in the scientific community….”

Moving away from APCs: a multi-stakeholder working group convened by cOAlition S, Jisc and PLOS – The Official PLOS Blog

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“cOAlition S, in partnership with Jisc and PLOS, are seeking to establish a multi-stakeholder working group to identify business models and arrangements that enable equitable participation in knowledge-sharing. The aims of this working group and the eligibility criteria that interested parties must meet in order to apply are outlined below.

We anticipate that the group will consist of a maximum of twelve individuals and will represent the three key stakeholders – funders, institutions/library consortia and publishers – in roughly equal proportions.

Once established, the working group is expected to convene up to six times. The key outcome from this collaborative effort will be the development of a model (or multiple models) that, if implemented, would enable equitable participation in knowledge sharing….”

Moving away from APCs: a multi-stakeholder working group convened by cOAlition S, Jisc and PLOS | Plan S

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“cOAlition S, in partnership with Jisc and PLOS, are seeking to establish a multi-stakeholder working group to identify business models and arrangements that enable equitable participation in knowledge-sharing. The aims of this working group and the eligibility criteria that interested parties must meet in order to apply are outlined below.

We anticipate that the group will consist of a maximum of twelve individuals and will represent the three key stakeholders – funders, institutions/library consortia and publishers – in roughly equal proportions.

Once established, the working group is expected to convene up to six times. The key outcome from this collaborative effort will be the development of a model (or multiple models) that, if implemented, would enable equitable participation in knowledge sharing.

Interested parties should apply using the form available at https://coalitions.typeform.com/MultiGroup….”

Open Science: stakeholders welcome European efforts towards publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication | Plan S

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For European public research and innovation actors, scholarly knowledge is a public good. Publicly funded research and its results should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls. This is essential in driving knowledge forward, promoting innovation and tackling social issues.

Key representative organisations of the public research and innovation sector have welcomed today’s adoption of the ‘Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing’.

Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal | Plan S

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“The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities. 

Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities. 

The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.

The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing….”

cOAlition S supports efforts to improve copyright framework for research | Plan S

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“Copyright retention has been at the core of Plan S since its inception. Its first principle is that authors or their institutions retain copyright to their work. The Rights Retention Strategy aims to ensure that authors retain their rights and comply with funders´ mandates of immediate open access under open licenses while publishing in the venue of their choice.  

cOAlition S welcomes the various rights retention strategies adopted by research funders and institutions, as well as efforts to improve copyright legislation for research. These include the introduction of Secondary Publication Rights in national copyright legislation, and the European Research Area policy work to identify barriers to access to and reuse of scientific publications in EU copyright legislation and propose legislative and non-legislative measures.  

cOAlition S is also supportive of exploring an EU Secondary Publication Right, advancing towards sustainable universal open access on an international scale, e.g. statutory licensing, and suggestions for mandatory clauses for scientific publishing agreements via contract law, mandatory reversion rights, EU harmonisation of first ownership, and mandatory and stronger exceptions and limitations for research (see: https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/891665 and https://zenodo.org/record/7148721).”

cOAlition S confirms the end of its financial support for Open Access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024 | Plan S

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Transformative arrangements – including Transformative Agreements and Transformative Journals – were developed to encourage subscription journals to transition to full and immediate open access within a defined timeframe (31st December 2024, as specified in the Plan S Implementation Guidance). After careful consideration of the outcomes of transformative arrangements, the leadership of cOAlition S reaffirms that, as a principle, its members will no longer financially support these arrangements after 2024.

Exceptionally, individual cOAlition S funders may still choose to financially participate in Transformative Agreements beyond 2024 as part of their respective national strategies. Such exceptions will be communicated on the cOAlition S website.

Support for Transformative Journals will also cease at the end of 2024. In anticipation of this, no new applications to this programme will be considered after the 30th of June 2023.

 

Freier Zugang umgehend und uneingeschränkt – das ändert ab dem 1. Januar 2023

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From Google’s English:  “The SNSF will adjust its Open Access requirements at the beginning of 2023. Scientific articles must now be accessible immediately. This corresponds to the principles of cOAlition S, which the SNSF joined in June 2022….

If scientific results are only publicly accessible after a blocking period, this not only harms science, but also society, which has often paid for this research. “From the point of view of the SNSF, the time for such delays in articles is now over,” says Matthias Egger, President of the National Research Council. “We no longer accept blocking periods.” If the SNSF funds a research project, the resulting articles must be freely available immediately.

As before, this obligation can be fulfilled in three different ways: publication in an open access journal (golden way), in a hybrid journal or as a manuscript version (“Author’s Accepted Manuscript”) in a digital archive (green way). The regulations for books and book chapters remain unchanged.

Use without any restrictions

Other requirements will also be new for 2023. The SNSF stipulates a CC-BY license for all articles. Scientific articles are primarily distributed and read digitally. Both the researchers and the SNSF have an interest in knowledge being spread as widely as possible and used in as many different ways as possible. The so-called Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses) are the standard today for the use of digital content and content distributed via the Internet. This means: The articles can basically be used without restrictions – from further distribution to automated evaluation in order to gain completely new insights. Of course, the researchers must be named as the authors each time they are used, and it must be clear whether the content has been changed.

rights reserved

Many publishers restrict what researchers can do with the articles they have created themselves through exclusive publication contracts. Very often these limitations also prevent the fulfillment of OA obligations. The SNSF is therefore adopting the rights retention strategy developed by cOAlition S: researchers reserve the right to make their manuscript freely available immediately and under a CC-BY license when they submit it. They refer to their obligations towards the SNSF….”