“IOP Publishing (IOPP) and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India have finalised a Read and Publish agreement as they work towards breaking down barriers to publishing open access (OA) for researchers from lower and lower middle-income countries.”
“OASPA is pleased to announce our next webinar — part two in our Funding Open Access after the Transformation series —which will focus on the perspective of funders.
At its launch in 2018, cOAlition S announced that its members would, for a “transition period,” fund open access fees for journals covered by “transformative” agreements. That move helped to establish read-and-publish deals as the leading OA business model, despite criticism that the agreements prop up the author-pays APC system. The same author-pays business model has, despite this opposition, also gained traction to fund the publication of OA books (through BPCs).
As cOAlition S recently communicated, the transition period is ending; beginning in 2025, funders adhering to Plan S will no longer support the agreements. What is more, a growing chorus of stakeholders, including the Ivy Plus librarians in the US, a coalition of UK-based researchers, and the Council of the European Union, are calling for an alternative, collective funding model for OA. At the same time, collective funding experiments as well as conditional open models (such as Subscribe to Open)—in which neither authors nor readers pay—are reporting promising results around the globe.
This webinar features perspectives on the emerging landscape of collective and conditional open models from funders, as a follow up to May’s webinar focused on publishers….”
“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….”
“This June marked 20 years since the academic community first agreed a set of open access (OA) research publishing principles.
Known as the Bethesda Statement, it acknowledged the pivotal role of free and open research for the creation and dissemination of new ideas and knowledge for the public benefit.
Driven by funder policy and institutional demand for a publishing ecosystem that is affordable, fair and transparent, the UK has been a leader in the transition to OA. But two decades on, overall progress in transitioning hybrid journals to fully OA and the elimination of paywalls has been slow.
We know the UK higher education institutions Jisc represents in sector negotiations with publishers are frustrated with the pace of progress. They are also keen to ensure that open access not only removes paywalls but allows everyone to participate in open scholarship.
It’s time to take stock and decide what happens next. To kickstart this process, Jisc has launched a review of the OA landscape in the UK and its transitional agreements (TAs)….”
Jisc launches critical review of open access and transitional agreements.
To kick start the slow shift towards fully open access academic publishing, Jisc has launched a review.
Commissioned and governed by Jisc’s strategic groups with input from Deltathink, an open access data and analytics company, the aim is to gather evidence, agitate discussion in the higher education sector and make recommendations for action.
Exploring the open access landscape in general and the particular role of transitional agreements (TAs), the review findings will be published early in 2024.
Jisc’s head of research licensing, Anna Vernon, explains why the review is necessary:
“The UK has been a leader in the transition to open access, driven by funder policy and institutional demand for a publishing ecosystem that is affordable, fair and transparent.
“However, two decades on from the first talks on open research, overall progress remains slow.
“We know the UK higher education institutions Jisc represents in sector negotiations with publishers are frustrated with the status quo.
“We hope this review will kick-start the process by supplying the evidence to drive sector consensus on what future open access publishing models should look like.”
[…]
“In its recent annual update about Transformative Journals (TJs), cOAlition S noted that many journals had not met their targets, for the second year in a row, and were being removed from the list of approved TJs.
Since most journals consistently missed the annual targets, we wondered if the originally included journals, at their demonstrated rates of growing OA content, could have eventually met the goal of 75% open access. Was this a timely move by cOAlition S to cut journals or was it premature?…
To date 30% of journals have met their targets or will very likely meet them within 5 years from now (2028)
56% will take more than 5 years from now
14% of journals are unlikely ever to exceed 75% OA output based on current OA growth rates…
We must also remember that cOAlition S didn’t select these journals – they selected themselves. If the goal was to see what kind of uptake was possible and then to see how journals included in a TJ program would perform, this feels like a reasonable experiment. Could a program like this provide another “tool in the toolbox” for accelerating OA? …”
“During the same period, Springer Nature signed 15 new transformative agreements and renewed five more, increasing the number of institutions covered by a TA by 22 per cent. Indeed, by 2022, articles published open access via a TA accounted for a full 20 per cent of all gold OA articles.
TAs are clearly where our focus should be. We published three times more OA articles in our Springer hybrid titles last year via TAs than via author choice. Moreover, in countries where we have a TA, up to 90 per cent of articles we publish are now published OA. In Germany, OA articles have grown by a factor of almost nine as a result of our TA with Projekt DEAL….”
“Coalition S strategy head criticises efforts from American Chemical Society, Elsevier and Springer Nature
Just over two-thirds of the ‘transformative journals’ permitted to receive funding from organisations participating in the Plan S open-access initiative are to be kicked out of the scheme for failing to meet their targets.
Under Plan S, a group of international funders require papers reporting research they have supported to be made openly available immediately under certain conditions. These include that the funders will only pay for publication in hybrid journals—which combine open-access and subscription options—if those journals have committed to transforming to full open access at a given rate.
Coalition S, the participating funder group, announced on 20 June that it would remove 1,589 out of 2,326 journals (68 per cent) from the transformative journals scheme. It said they failed to meet their requirements to increase their share of open-access content by 5 percentage points annually on an absolute basis and 15 per cent annually on a relative basis, and to revoke the subscription option once 75 per cent of articles are made openly available.
The scheme, launched in 2020, is designed to encourage the transition of subscription-based scholarly publishing to full and immediate open access….”
“Two-thirds of the more than 2300 scientific journals participating in a program designed to flip them to open access (OA) failed to meet prescribed targets for progress in 2022. As a result, the Coalition S group of research funders behind the initiative announced today that it will remove these journals from the program at the end of the year. The funders will no longer pay the fees these journals charge authors for OA publication, although scholars may still publish OA articles in these titles if they pay using other funding sources.
Although most publishers say they support a transition to OA from the existing subscription-based model, the decision by Coalition S reflects that progress has been slower than these research funders, and many scientists, would like. “That so many titles were unable to meet their OA growth targets suggests that for some publishers, the transition to full and immediate open access is unlikely to happen in a reasonable time frame,” says Robert Kiley, Coalition S’s head of strategy, in a blog post published today….”
“At cOAlition S, we are committed to accelerating the transition to open access. As an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, along with the European Commission, we have been rolling out policies and tools since 2018 to achieve the goal of Plan S. In this annual report, we are presenting an overview of our activities in 2022, as well as the latest news on our policies, tools, and services. We also outline our support for various publishing models and highlight specific initiatives of cOAlition S funders. In the last section, we give a preview of our plans for 2023 as we look towards the future of scholarly communication….”
“At cOAlition S, we are committed to accelerating the transition to open access. As an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, along with the European Commission, we have been rolling out policies and tools since 2018 to achieve the goal of Plan S. In this annual report, we are presenting an overview of our activities in 2022, as well as the latest news on our policies, tools, and services. We also outline our support for various publishing models and highlight specific initiatives of cOAlition S funders. In the last section, we give a preview of our plans for 2023 as we look towards the future of scholarly communication….”
“At cOAlition S, we are committed to accelerating the transition to open access. As an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, along with the European Commission, we have been rolling out policies and tools since 2018 to achieve the goal of Plan S. In this annual report, we are presenting an overview of our activities in 2022, as well as the latest news on our policies, tools, and services. We also outline our support for various publishing models and highlight specific initiatives of cOAlition S funders. In the last section, we give a preview of our plans for 2023 as we look towards the future of scholarly communication….”
“At cOAlition S, we are committed to accelerating the transition to open access. As an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, along with the European Commission, we have been rolling out policies and tools since 2018 to achieve the goal of Plan S. In this annual report, we are presenting an overview of our activities in 2022, as well as the latest news on our policies, tools, and services. We also outline our support for various publishing models and highlight specific initiatives of cOAlition S funders. In the last section, we give a preview of our plans for 2023 as we look towards the future of scholarly communication….”
Abstract: Since the arrival of Plan S and the Open Access Movement, the academic community has had to adapt to changing methods of information dissemination in scholarly research. This transition to Open Access publishing models requires scholarly research funded by public or private grants to be published in Open Access journals or platforms. Research therefore becomes freely available for all with the barrier of paywalls being removed. However, researchers must now pay to publish their research and Publishers are free to increase article processing charges as they see fit. With access to funding being limited for scholars in some regions of the world, inequality in ability to access research has instead shifted towards inequality in ability to publish research. Publishers seek to address this inequity through comprehensive article processing charge waiver and discount policies for Open Access journals. In our poster presentation, we would like to discuss what is being done to address issues around inequity associated with Open Access publishing models across different fields of study.
[Should be titled: How is scholarly communication impacted by the shift to [APC-based gold] open access and are we equitably meeting the needs of the global community?]
Abstract: Since the arrival of Plan S and the Open Access Movement, the academic community has had to adapt to changing methods of information dissemination in scholarly research. This transition to Open Access publishing models requires scholarly research funded by public or private grants to be published in Open Access journals or platforms. Research therefore becomes freely available for all with the barrier of paywalls being removed. However, researchers must now pay to publish their research and Publishers are free to increase article processing charges as they see fit. With access to funding being limited for scholars in some regions of the world, inequality in ability to access research has instead shifted towards inequality in ability to publish research. Publishers seek to address this inequity through comprehensive article processing charge waiver and discount policies for Open Access journals. In our poster presentation, we would like to discuss what is being done to address issues around inequity associated with Open Access publishing models across different fields of study.
[Should be titled: How is scholarly communication impacted by the shift to [APC-based gold] open access and are we equitably meeting the needs of the global community?]