License Agreements – DigitalKoans

"Wiley Inks 22 Open Access Agreements across North America"

These agreements, which all begin in 2023, span individual universities, research labs, and academic consortia across 18 U.S. states and Mexico. They allow participating institutions access to all of Wiley’s hybrid and subscription journals and grant researchers the ability to publish accepted articles open access across Wiley’s extensive publishing portfolio. . . .

A full list of participating partners includes:

Individual Institutions: University of Alabama at Birmingham, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Colorado State University, Montana State University, Princeton University, Southern Methodist University, Syracuse University, UMass Lowell, West Virginia University, Texas Tech University Health Services Center, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Portland State University, Northeastern University, Texas A&M University, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (CINVESTAV), University of North Texas Health Science Center, Washington State University, and Texas Christian University.

Consortia: The Carolina Consortium, and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC).

https://bit.ly/3ORnyqT

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a License"

This column describes how one library seeks to mitigate harms or to optimize protections and advantages resulting from journal licenses. Progress toward improved licensing outcomes is described with examples or with qualitative data, from a comprehensive overview of one library’s journal licenses. Discussion includes so-called transformative agreements, a variety of rights, non-disclosure and data privacy clauses, term and termination, and transfer obligations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102737

UC System: "Re: UCOLASC [University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication] Statement on Retention of Author Rights in License to Publish Agreements"

As discussed at our joint UCOLASC and Council of University Librarians (CoUL) meeting held on February 15, 2023, the Project Transform Negotiating Team (PTNT) and Project Transform Working Group (PTWG) have learned that many publishers are requiring University of California (UC) authors to sign "License to Publish" (LTP) agreements, which purport to grant exclusive rights to publishers and contravene the spirit of the open access (OA) policies and declarations strongly endorsed by UC faculty.We find this now-common practice to be unacceptable and therefore ask you to prioritize the issue of author rights and act on our behalf when you negotiate with publishers. . . .

UCOLASC urges the Project Transform Negotiating Team (PTNT) to negotiate transformative open access agreements with publishers stipulating that authors only grant "limited" or "nonexclusive" licenses to publishers. Liberal Creative Commons (CC) licenses (e.g., CC BY) should be applied as the default choice, and licenses that restrict commercial and derivative uses of the work (e.g., CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, and CC BY-NC-ND) should function as originally intended with authors always free to do whatever they want with their own works.

https://bit.ly/43uzuDd

"Gold Open Access Output and Expenditures in the United States in the Past Decade"

In this study we demonstrated some of the main differences in Gold Open Access publications and expenditures across various states and institutions in the United States. Our data shows that the majority of states published between 1,000 – 7,000 Gold Open Access publications and spent up to 6million dollars in the past 10 years. However, there are some noteworthy outliers such as Washington, Minnesota and Maryland with relatively low number of publications and high expenditures while states such as California, Ohio and especially New York which published relatively high number of Gold Open Access papers with relatively low costs comparatively.

https://doi.org/10.55835/64410a4a643beb0d90fc4707

"PeerJ Announces a New Open Access Model and the University of Bath as Their First Institutional Partner"

PeerJ has announced a new Open Access model and their first institutional partner. The award-winning publisher intends to move towards collective action for globally equitable Open Access, and their first step to this goal is a new model for institutional partners — Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs). AIMs remove payment barriers to Open Access for authors, reduces the administration of Open Access payments, and guarantees value for partners. The University of Bath is PeerJ’s first partner in this new program, which will provide unlimited publishing for Bath’s faculty for a flat annual fee.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/989462

Paywall: "’Significant Reservations’ on UK’s Springer Nature Open-Access Deal"

These concerns centred on the high cost of publishing open access outside the agreement and limited transparency, particularly regarding how Springer Nature’s article-processing charges (APCs) are calculated, with gold open access for Nature priced at £8,490. Springer Nature was one of several major publishers — along with Elsevier — which opted in November not to participate in Plan S’ Journal Comparison Service, in which journals shared information about their costs and services.

https://bit.ly/44nG8wf

Academic Publishing and Open Access. What Does Economics Teach Us?

While the gold regime seems the most natural way to achieve open access, a generalized switch to open access may also have undesired consequences: projections indeed suggest that a massive move towards the gold regime would generate an explosion in the amount of APC unless there are controls to limit market power. Beside the sharp increase in APC, the shift to gold open access may create conflicts of interest for publishers given that their income comes from authors and may alter the quality of publications. The green regime, by introducing competition between the journal’s version of an article and a free public version, seems an efficient way to reduce market power while expanding access.

https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04080573

"Wiley Removes Goodin as Editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (Updated)"

[Comments by Anna Stilz, Princeton] Wiley has recently signed a number of major open-access agreements: this means that increasingly, they get their revenue through author fees for each article they publish (often covered now by public grant agencies), rather than library subscriptions. Their current company-wide strategy for maximizing revenue is to force the journals they own to publish as many articles as possible to generate maximum author fees. . . .

Wiley is not asking that we consider publishing a few more pieces that fall at the borderline and are tough judgment calls. They are asking that we increase the number of articles we publish by a factor of 10, and that we continue increasing that number year after year.

https://bit.ly/42co3zq

Common Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Landscape Review

Scholarly communication is a complicated sector, with numerous participants and multiple mechanisms for communicating and reviewing materials created in an increasing variety of formats by researchers across the globe.[1] In turn, the researcher who seeks to use the products of this system wishes to discover, access, and use relevant and trustworthy materials as effortlessly as possible. The work of driving efficiency into this complex sector while bringing its multiple strands together seamlessly for the reader (or, increasingly, for a computational user) rests on a foundation of infrastructure, much of it shared across multiple publishers. In this landscape review, we seek to provide a high-level overview of the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.318775

"No Deal: German Researchers’ Publishing and Citing Behaviours after Big Deal Negotiations with Elsevier"

In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions. We investigated the effect on researchers’ publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ~400,000 articles published by researchers at DEAL institutions between 2012–2020. We further investigated these effects with respect to the timing of contract cancellations, research disciplines, collaboration patterns, and article open-access status. We find evidence for a decrease in Elsevier’s market share of articles from DEAL institutions, with the largest year-on-year market share decreases occuring from 2018 to 2020 following the implementation of access restrictions. We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations, although the decrease is smaller. We conclude that negotiations with Elsevier and access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness to publish in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, implying that researchers use other methods to access scientific literature.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00255

"Which Factors are Associated with Open Access Publishing? A Springer Nature Case Study"

Open Access (OA) facilitates access to articles. But, authors or funders often must pay the publishing costs preventing authors who do not receive financial support from participating in OA publishing and citation advantage for OA articles. OA may exacerbate existing inequalities in the publication system rather than overcome them. To investigate this, we studied 522,411 articles published by Springer Nature. Employing correlation and regression analyses, we describe the relationship between authors affiliated with countries from different income levels, their choice of publishing model, and the citation impact of their papers. A machine learning classification method helped us to explore the importance of different features in predicting the publishing model. The results show that authors eligible for APC waivers publish more in gold-OA journals than other authors. In contrast, authors eligible for an APC discount have the lowest ratio of OA publications, leading to the assumption that this discount insufficiently motivates authors to publish in gold-OA journals. We found a strong correlation between the journal rank and the publishing model in gold-OA journals, whereas the OA option is mostly avoided in hybrid journals. Also, results show the countries’ income level, seniority, and experience with OA publications as the most predictive factors for OA publishing in hybrid journals.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00253

Paywall: "When the Big Deal Gets Smaller: Use of ScienceDirect after Cancellations "

This study investigates how article downloads from ScienceDirect changed after Temple University Libraries downsized its all-inclusive Elsevier big deal bundle to a selective custom package. After the libraries lost current-year access to nearly half of Elsevier’s active journals, the total downloads from Elsevier journals declined by 16.2 percent over three years. Combined use of still-subscribed and open access journals fell 10.6 percent in the same three years. . . . Reliance on open access appears to have increased.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/887660

Paywall: "Going for Gold, Deep in the Red"

Having survived the budget uncertainties following the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries are no strangers to the hard work, patience, and luck needed when it comes to budget planning and pushing publishers toward OA. But will libraries ever achieve the ultimate feat of bagging gold OA for all titles in all disciplines? Open access comes at a price; a gold sweep may not be possible as many institutions continue to struggle financially with the after-effects of the pandemic and lower enrollment figures.

http://bit.ly/3MHU5yy

"University of California Agreement with Wiley Expands to All 10 UC Campuses: New Agreement Quadruples the Number of UC Articles Eligible for Free and Open Access in Wiley Journals"

The University of California, which generates nearly 10 percent of U.S. research output, and Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers, announced today an expansion of their open access agreement. Researchers at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will now receive funding support to publish open access, making significantly more UC research freely available to people around the world.

http://bit.ly/3GYDW4n

Digital Scholarship Releases New PDF Versions of Its Bibliographies

This spring, Digital Scholarship’s bibliographies in the HTML format were reformatted as single page files with internal navigation. This included all bibliographies that were in HTML format only as well as the HTML versions of paperback books. These new PDFs are in a 12 point font and are designed for printing; however, they also have live links for immediate access. There were no content changes. For a list of all Digital Scholarship publications, see the site map.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, v. 3

Altmetrics Bibliography

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, v. 2

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement

Digital Curation Resource Guide

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, v.7

E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography

Google Books Bibliography, v. 7

Institutional Repository Bibliography, v. 4

Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals

Open Access Journals Bibliography

Open Access Webliography

Research Data Curation Bibliography, v. 10

Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography

Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, v. 80

Transforming Peer Review Bibliography

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography

"Funding the Business of Open Access: A Bibliometric Analysis of Article Processing Charges, Research Funding and the Revenues of the Oligopoly of Publishers"

Since the early 2010s, more than half of peer-reviewed journal articles have been published by the so-called oligopoly of academic publishers — Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. These publishers are now increasingly charging fees for open access journals, especially given the rise of funder OA mandates. It is worthwhile to examine the amount of revenue generated through OA fees since many of the journals with the most expensive article processing charges are owned by the oligopoly. This study aims to estimate the amount of article processing charges for gold and hybrid open access articles in journals published by the oligopoly of academic publishers, which acknowledge funding from the Canadian Tri-Agencies between 2015 and 2018. The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications mandates that all funded research for Canadian Institute of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grantees be made available as OA. To comply, grantees will often use grant funds to pay OA fees, or APCs. During the four-year period analyzed, a total of 6,892 gold and 4,097 hybrid articles that acknowledge Tri-Agency funding were identified, for which the total list prices amount to $USD 25.3 million ($13.1 for gold and $12.2 for hybrid).

bit.ly/3THSB9f

"Open Access Charges — Continued Consolidation and Increases"

Publishers that only publish fully open journals (the group of bars to the left) have historically charged lower APCs than their mixed-model siblings (shown on the right). However, the fully OA prices of the OA-only publishers have caught up over the last few years and are now slightly higher than the fully OA prices of mixed-model publishers. Although not shown here, our data allows us to separate out fully OA imprints (such as BioMed Central) from their parent publishers. These have followed similar trends to the prices of OA-only publishers but are slightly cheaper than their OA-only siblings.

bit.ly/3JDRkfF

"Guest Post – Article Processing Charges are a Heavy Burden for Middle-Income Countries"

Perhaps recognizing that publication costs could be a barrier toward inclusive publishing, Plan S includes a provision that the journal/platform must provide APC waivers for authors from low-income economies and discounts for authors from lower middle-income economies. This policy is based on World Bank classifications of national economies and is adopted by companies such as Springer Nature (including Nature Portfolio and BMC journals) and Taylor & Francis. It sounds good in principle, but in practice is very limited . . . It is easy to see that many (if not most) countries widely recognized as developing, in which research investments are significantly lower than in the US or most of Europe, are not included by this waiver and discount recommendation. Indeed, no Latin American country qualifies for full APC waivers, since all are technically at least lower middle-income economies; only a handful qualify for partial discounts.

bit.ly/420W4Df

Bye, Bye Big Deal: "Indispensable or Unnecessary?: A Data-Driven Appraisal of Post-cancellation Access Rights"

When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.601

Penn State: "University Libraries Expands Open Access Support via 3 New BTAA [Big 10] Agreements"

The agreements with Wiley, Institute of Physics (IOP) and Microbiology Society cover OA publishing charges for Penn State corresponding authors publishing in these publishers’ journals. Those qualified articles will be immediately open access on the publisher’s platform. These publishers will offer a choice of open access licenses to Penn State authors publishing in their journals. Authors retain copyright in their articles.

The agreements run for three years from Jan. 1, 2023, to Dec. 31, 2025. In general, articles will need to be accepted during the agreements’ timeframe. The agreements also cover subscriptions and read access to Wiley, Institute of Physics (IOP) and Microbiology Society journals. Unlimited open access publishing is included with no additional cost to individual Penn State authors.

bit.ly/3Sjx9Xa

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Wiley Extends Open Access Agreement with Big Ten Academic Alliance "

Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers and a global leader in research and education, today announced a three-year extension of its landmark open publishing agreement with the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, which serve universities across the midwestern and eastern United States.

This landmark agreement is "all open access," with no fees to Big Ten Academic Alliance faculty and researchers for publishing in all journals under the Wiley umbrella, including Hindawi’s gold open access portfolio. The agreement, active as of January 1, 2023, grants 14 participating flagship universities and 17 affiliated campuses access to read and publish in Wiley’s full portfolio of journals. Lead authors at all campuses covered by the agreement can publish their articles as open access, ensuring that their research will be immediately open and available to the public and that they will retain rights in their own work.

bit.ly/3Eaov7G

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Open Access: A Journey from Impossible to Probable, but Still Uncertain"

An overview of the evolution of open access (OA) to scientific publications over the last 20 years is presented. This retrospective look allows us to make two observations that seem to overlap: on the one hand, how close the initial objective seems to be to what initially seemed utopian and, on the other, the unanticipated and solid obstacles that open access has encountered along the way, as well as the unexpected and diverse solutions that are emerging to overcome them. The overall assessment of OA is positive, and it underscores that open access is (or is becoming) possible, that it is good, and that it is necessary. However, this overall positive evolution has come up against two major obstacles that are slowing its progress: the double payments generated by hybrid journals (subscription and article processing charges [APCs]) and the unchecked growth in APCs. In addition, this intensive use of APCs is creating a publishing gap between publishers that charge fees to authors and those that do not, and ultimately, it is causing dissension regarding the (previously shared) strategy toward open access. There are no immediate, one-off solutions to overcome the aforementioned dysfunctions, although three actions that, in the medium term, can remedy them can be mentioned: changing the approach to the evaluation of science, adopting measures to regulate APCs, and promoting alternative publication models. Finally, it should be noted that OA has acted as the vanguard and spearhead of a broader movement: that of open science.

https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2023.ene.13

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Licensing Challenges Associated With Text and Data Mining: How Do We Get Our Patrons What They Need?"

Today’s researchers expect to be able to complete text and data mining (TDM) work on many types of textual data. But they are often blocked more by contractual limitations on what data they can use, and how they can use it, than they are by what data may be available to them. This article lays out the different types of TDM processes currently in use, the issues that may block researchers from being able to do the work they would like, and some possible solutions.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15530

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"A Free Toolkit to Foster Open Access Agreements"

In November 2021, with the support of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and cOAlition S, four ‘task and finish’ working groups were established. The authors facilitated and supported these groups. Each group was responsible for producing tools that will enable library consortia and small independent publishers to negotiate transformative agreements, which is to say, agreements that will enable the publisher to fully transition to open access. The first task and finish group developed shared principles for transformative agreements. The second developed a data template to enable smaller independent publishers to reach agreements with library consortia and libraries, while the third developed example licence agreements. These groups recognized that the implementation of a transformative agreement crosses a complex ecosystem of technology, processes, policies, automated functions and manual functions that relate to contract management, article submission and peer review, content hosting and dissemination as well as financial management. For this reason, a fourth group produced a workflow framework that describes the process in all its phases. The members of these four groups were volunteers from stakeholder communities including libraries, library consortia, smaller independent publishers and intermediaries. This article explains why these tools are needed and the process behind their creation. The authors have combined these tools into a freely available toolkit, available under a CC BY licence.

http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.585

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"cOAlition S Confirms the End of Its Financial Support for Open Access Publishing under Transformative Arrangements after 2024"

Plan S was launched in 2018. At that time, cOAlition S recognised that transformative arrangements would provide a useful means to repurpose funds for journal subscriptions to publication fees, thus supporting legacy publishers in transforming paywalled to Open Access publication models. It was, however, also clear that the transformation would have to be completed at a definite point in time, by the end of 2024 at the latest. We maintain this timeline. We believe that the strategy of providing financial support for these arrangements—endorsed by many cOAlition S members—beyond 2024 would significantly increase the risk that these arrangements will become permanent and perpetuate hybrid Open Access, which cOAlition S has always firmly opposed.

bit.ly/3Y2l8He

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |