Category Archives: oa.transitions

Assessing and managing transitional read and publish deals: a University of Salford case study

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This case study explores the processes and challenges of assessing and managing transitional agreements (TAs) at the University of Salford. TAs are contracts with publishers that shift spending from subscriptions to open access and therefore enable the transition to full and immediate open access for research articles. As a teaching-intensive and research-informed university with a small team, Salford needs to ensure that transitional deals are managed effectively and efficiently to maximize our resources and provide the content and publishing opportunities needed to support our teaching and research strategies. Here we describe our processes and the challenges we have faced working remotely and across teams. Finally, we reflect on future developments and how we can continue to adapt and develop our processes as the scholarly landscape evolves.

Austrian Transition to Open Access: a collaborative approach

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This article presents a collaborative project, the ‘Austrian Transition to Open Access’ (AT2OA), initially running from 2017 to 2020, which had the overarching goal of enabling the large-scale transformation of publishing outputs from closed to open access (OA) in Austria. The initiative, which has recently secured funding for a second four-year cycle from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, brings together all key players: universities, research institutes, the national library consortium and a cOAlition S funding member, the Austrian Science Fund. The project outcomes include a transition feasibility study that builds on the methodology of the 2015 Schimmer et al. article, the seeds of a national OA monitoring data hub and transformative agreements with major publishers. In addition, the project helped launch institutional OA Publishing Funds across the country and explored alternative publishing models. Furthermore, it saw the emergence of a nationwide network of OA experts. The authors also share their thoughts on lessons learned.