Category Archives: oa.tjs

How was the transition to open access advanced in 2022? | Research Information

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“Undoubtedly, 2022 has been a year of growth for open access (OA). Funder policies and deadlines have come into play and, as a result of the pandemic, the impact and benefits of open research and open access are now better understood by people beyond academia. 

Overall, two themes featured strongly – the need for OA take up to become more global and the importance for authors to remain able to publish in their journal of choice. Taken together these themes were instrumental to enabling OA growth in 2022….

And when we look at the policy developments that have taken place this year with a number of countries reviewing their approach to OA and considering policy recommendations to speed up the transition, this move beyond Europe is likely to continue:

US- The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)) has updated the US policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost

Australia – Australian funding agency, National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), has introduced the requirement that scholarly publications arising from the research it funds be made freely available and accessible

India – the Ministry of Education has announced the deadline for the launch of the “One Nation, One Subscription” (ONOS) policy for scientific research papers and academic journals from April 2023 to ensure countrywide access for researchers and the broader public.

 

Come 2023, we are likely to see even greater take up by authors of OA. Moreover publishers, such as Springer Nature, continue to be ready to work with funders and others to ensure that these policies drive the OA transition in a sustainable way while ensuring the needs of the researchers continue to be met. For a long time we have had the ‘supply’ (the ability to publish OA), what we have been waiting for is the ‘demand’ (authors wanting to publish OA)….”

Publishing in transformative journals to make your research openly available | Jisc

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“Transformative journals are a key route to open access. Jisc is negotiating with publishers on behalf of the sector to ensure that their journals are funder compliant. This guide will show researchers how they can publish their research open access in a transformative journal in order to meet funding requirements.  …”

IEEE Commits its Entire Hybrid Journal Portfolio to Transformative Journal Status Aligned with Plan S

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IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, announced today that it has committed its full portfolio of more than 160 hybrid journals, which publish both open access and subscription-based content, to become Transformative Journals under Plan S.

This commitment means that any authors receiving research grants from Coalition S, a group of research funders, are compliant with Plan S requirements when publishing their research articles in any IEEE fully open access or hybrid journals. In addition to the existing direct open access agreements with hundreds of institutions, all of IEEE’s hybrid journals now qualify as ‘Transformative Journals’ under Plan S.

IEEE Commits its Entire Hybrid Journal Portfolio to Transformative Journal Status Aligned with Plan S | STM Publishing News

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“IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, announced today that it has committed its full portfolio of more than 160 hybrid journals, which publish both open access and subscription-based content, to become Transformative Journals under Plan S. 

This commitment means that any authors receiving research grants from Coalition S, a group of research funders, are compliant with Plan S requirements when publishing their research articles in any IEEE fully open access or hybrid journals. In addition to the existing direct open access agreements with hundreds of institutions, all of IEEE’s hybrid journals now qualify as ‘Transformative Journals’ under Plan S….”

Elsevier absent from journal cost comparison | Times Higher Education (THE)

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“Of the 2,070 titles whose information will become accessible under the JCS, although not directly to researchers, 1,000 belong to the US academic publishing giant Wiley, while another 219 journals owned by Hindawi, which was bought by Wiley last year, also appear on the list.

Several other fully open access publishers will also participate on the comparison site including Plos, the Open Library of Humanities, and F1000, while learned society presses and university publishers, including the Royal Society, Rockefeller University Press, and the International Union of Crystallography, are also part of the scheme.

Other notable participants include the prestigious life sciences publisher eLife, EMBO Press and the rapidly growing open access publisher, Frontiers.

However, the two of the world’s largest scholarly publishers – Elsevier and Springer Nature, whose most prestigious titles charge about £8,000 for APCs – are not part of the scheme….

Under the Plan S agreement, scholarly journals are obliged to become ‘transformative journals’ and gradually increase the proportion of non-paywalled content over a number of years. Those titles that do not make their papers free at the point of publication will drop out of the Plan S scheme, meaning authors cannot use funds provided by any of the 17 funding agencies and six foundations now signed up to Plan S. There are, however, no immediate consequences for a publisher who decides not to share their price and service data through the JCS.  …”

Guest Post – Why Transformative Agreements Should Offer Unlimited Open Access Publishing – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“According to figures from the ESAC initiative, there has been a 60% year on year increase in TAs. In 2021, 184 TAs were made worldwide compared to 114 in 2020, and the upward trend is continuing as 103 TAs have been listed in the first four months of this year. TAs, which have been gaining ground in Europe for several years, are now also appearing in the US and Canada and spreading across other countries around the world. In January next year, the first TA with the Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) consortium which represents mainly Lower-Middle-Income Countries, will come into effect….

So, the interest is clear, and so is the uptake. But are all TAs made equal and do they make good on their promises? TAs set out to ‘transition’ or ‘transform’ existing library spend on subscriptions to academic journals towards OA publication fees. I’ve taken a closer look across the industry and assessed the aspirations of various TAs and compared them to our own TA approach here at IOP Publishing (IOPP).

 

For TAs to deliver on their promise of enabling OA at scale they must deliver on the basic notion of transformation as a first principle. Looking at restricted or capped TA models, where the number of articles that can be published under the agreement is limited, we believe that the transition to full and immediate OA at scale will not be achieved….

So, whilst many approaches and models exist, we believe that the one that offers the most effective shift to a more open future at scale is a TA that offers inclusive and unlimited publishing. It provides a simple and transparent framework to accelerate the move to open access in a way that is sustainable for both libraries and publishers. Genuine transformative agreements must maximize OA publishing capability, remove payment barriers for authors, move subscription funds to publishing, and increase efficacy for library staff. We believe that author choice should remain the north star in the evolution of open access publishing models. Simplicity in a world of complexity should be admired and not avoided.”

Read & Publish: over 500 participating institutions – The Company of Biologists

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“We are delighted to announce that the number of institutions participating in our cost-neutral Read & Publish Open Access (OA) initiative has more than doubled since June 2021, increasing from 253 to 522.

The number of countries represented has also risen by more than 50% over the last year – from 24 to 39. We have signed new agreements with library consortia in Australia, Spain, Sweden and the United States and, following a successful two-year pilot, we signed a three-year renewal agreement with Jisc in the UK.

The success of our Read & Publish initiative has contributed to a significant growth in the proportion of OA research content in our hybrid journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology.

The journals were the first in the world to be afforded Transformative Journal status by Plan S and all three exceeded their targets for OA growth in 2021.

Our hybrid journals are on track to meet their Transformative Journal targets in 2022 and this takes us closer to our goal of converting them to full OA.

Building on the success of the initiative, libraries can now also include our fully Open Access journals – Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open – in their Read & Publish agreements….”

Is there a special, Year 1, exception for TJ titles which do not meet their 2021 (Year 1) Open Access target? | Plan S

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“The Transformative Journal programme is a new initiative, designed to provide another route by which publishers can provide a Plan S-aligned publishing option to cOAlition S funded-researchers. Given that this model is still in its infancy, cOAlition S has agreed that if a Transformative Journal does not meet its Year 1 (2021) OA target, then the Transformative Journal title can remain in the programme, provided that the journal agrees that the Year 2 target is calculated as if the Year 1 target had been achieved. Figure 1, below, provides an illustration….”

Springer Nature’s revised application for Jisc-approved transformative journal status accepted | Jisc

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Following feedback from the content expert group on its author facing communications and workflows, Springer Nature submitted a revised application for Jisc-approved transformative journal status for their Nature Research and Palgrave titles. 

The application, which includes revisions to the author journey and communications, has been reviewed and approved by the content expert group. Once the changes have been implemented, expected to be 8 August 2022, the costs of APCs for papers submitted to the Nature Research and Palgrave journals after 1 April 2022 will now be eligible for?UKRI OA funds. As institutional OA funds are limited, authors should continue to discuss submissions and publishing options with their institution. 

 

Transformative Journals: analysis of Year 1 (2021) | Plan S

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“The Transformative Journal (TJ) model is one of the strategies cOAlition S endorses to help subscription publishers transition to full and immediate Open Access (OA). To be awarded TJ status, a title must publicly commit to transitioning to fully Open Access, and agree to: 

work to increase the share of Open Access content, year on year, in line with publicly agreed targets; and 
offset subscription income from payments for publishing services (to avoid double payments). 

As of June 2022, some 16 publishers – large and small, for-profit, not-for-profit, society publishers and university presses – totalling some 2304 journals, have enrolled in this programme. Figure 1, shows the breakdown of TJs by publisher….

This blog post provides a summary of the first full year of the TJ programme, using data supplied by all participating publishers….”

Transformative? | Clarke & Esposito

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“cOAlition S has released a report analyzing the first year of the Transformative Journal (TJ) program. As a reminder, TJs (not to be confused with TAs, or Transformative Agreements) are individual hybrid journals that have agreed to (try to) show an “annual increase in the proportion of open access (OA) research content of at least 5% points in absolute terms, and at least 15% in relative terms, year-on-year.” The journal must also publicly agree to flip to OA when 75% of its research content is published OA. These promises allow the hybrid journal to be considered compliant with Plan S and eligible for article processing charge (APC) funds.

 
The report shows that more than half (56%) of the 2,304 journals in the program did not meet their first-year OA targets. The coalition has extended its requirements another year, keeping all TJs in the program (although they must meet year 2 targets calculated as if the journal had met its year 1 numbers). 
 
Removing 56% of the journals would result in 1,290 fewer publication venues for Plan S-funded researchers, which is perhaps part of the reason for the extension. 

Notably, many of the TJs have failed to meet another cOAlition S requirement: a public statement showing how the presence of OA articles has reduced the subscription price of the journal. Elsevier and Springer Nature (182 and 1,714 TJs, respectively) instead have offered “a more generic, anti-double dipping statement,” which apparently has been accepted for 2021, but will not fly for 2022. This raises the question of how a publisher would practically be able to show such a metric. …”

 

Cambridge’s Transformative Journals see 70 per cent leap in research published open access | STM Publishing News

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“The amount of new research published open access (OA) in Cambridge’s Transformative Journals (TJs) leaped by almost 70 per cent in 2021.

Cambridge University Press revealed the figure in an update to the cOAlition S group of funders on the progress of its TJ programme.

The update also shows that the programme exceeded its open access growth target for the year, playing an important role in Cambridge’s plans to transform the vast majority of the research publishing in its journals to OA by 2025.

Overall, the proportion of research articles published Gold OA in Cambridge journals increased to 36 per cent last year – a 47 per cent increase on 2020. The publisher expects that to have reached 50 per cent by the end of this year….”

Transformative Journals: analysis of Year 1 (2021) | Plan S

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The Transformative Journal (TJ) model is one of the strategies cOAlition S endorses to help subscription publishers transition to full and immediate Open Access (OA). To be awarded TJ status, a title must publicly commit to transitioning to fully Open Access, and agree to:  work to increase the share of Open Access content, year on year, in line with publicly agreed targets; and  offset subscription income from payments for publishing services (to avoid double payments).  As of June 2022, some 16 publishers – large and small, for-profit, not-for-profit, society publishers and university presses – totalling some 2304 journals, have enrolled in this programme. Figure 1, shows the breakdown of TJs by publisher.