Open Access and Other License Agreements – Page 3

"NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Recommended Practice for Operationalizing Open Access Business Processes"

The volume of OA content has proliferated in recent years, but the systems and workflows currently used by publishers and librarians were designed for traditional, pay-to-read models. Business processes are currently inadequate to address the requirements of—for example—transformative agreements, which require complex financial management and the tracking of authors and publishing outputs across large institutions. Libraries face challenges in managing micropayments and assessing the financial impact of such agreements, and authors often have difficulty determining whether their manuscript is eligible for OA publication under agreement terms. These complexities also impact publisher editorial and financial systems. As a result, organizations often adopt manual processes for managing these agreements, giving rise to inefficiencies across the ecosystem.

NISO’s Working Group will address the problem by identifying gaps in the infrastructure for OA publications and agreements, developing terminology to describe the surrounding processes, and outlining best practices for exchanging data and analytics and metrics. The work will focus first on the metadata required for exchange prior to publication as well as for article-level financial transactions, and then address reporting following publication. As the new Recommended Practice will be of interest to publishers, libraries, authors, funders, and OA advocates and community initiatives, the group is seeking volunteers representing a range of stakeholder groups from across the scholarly communications industry.

https://tinyurl.com/ywb7cu3e

"Over 1000 Institutions Now Covered by RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) Read & Publish Agreements"

The Royal Society of Chemistry has signed a Read & Publish agreement with CRUE (Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas, the national consortium of Spanish Universities), taking the number of institutions in the RSC’s R&P community to more than one thousand covering 32 countries.

https://tinyurl.com/3jc9juus

CNRS: "Publication Costs — ‘We Are on the Edge of the Abyss’"

Alain Schuhl, the Deputy CEO for Science at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS):

A recent prospective study in France run by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research reported that France paid almost €30 million in APCs in 2020. The same study suggests that at this rate of increase France could be paying €50 million in APCs by 2030 or even nearly €200 million [about $219,907,000] if all scientific publications have switched to the author-pays model by then. This amount is far higher than the budget of the subscription-based model which is already excessively expensive.

https://tinyurl.com/3xfkz79h

"Article Processing Charges for Open Access Journal Publishing: A Review"

This paper reviews literature on article processing charges (APCs) that has been published since 2000. Despite praise for diamond OA journals, which charge no fees, most OA articles are published by commercial publishers that charge APCs. Publishers fix APCs depending on the reputation assigned to journals by peers. Evidence shows a relationship between high impact metrics and higher, faster rising APCs. Authors express reluctance about APCs, although this varies by discipline depending on previous experience of paying publication fees and the availability of research grants to cover them. Authors rely on a mix of research grants, library funds and personal assets to pay the charges. Two major concerns have been raised in relation to APCs: the inability of poorly funded authors to publish research and their impact on journal quality. Waivers have not solved the first issue. Research shows little extension of waiver use, unintended side effects on co-author networks and concerns regarding criteria to qualify for them. Bibliometric studies concur that journals that charge APCs have a similar citation impact to journals that rely on other income sources.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1558

"Significant Acceleration of Humanities and Social Sciences Open Access through Taylor & Francis and Jisc Transformative Agreement"

A wealth of additional detail about open access articles supported by the Jisc agreement is presented in the report, including:

432% increase in OA articles between 2020 and 2022.

16.2 million article downloads, including 3.5 million in the US.

Articles published OA via the agreement received an average of 2.18 scholarly citations, whereas non-OA articles by researchers at the same institutions had 1.33 citations.

https://tinyurl.com/39urswyj

What Direct Support Is Available for Open-Access Diamond Journals? Funding Models and Arrangements For Implementation

The author-pays model for open-access journals is increasingly criticised because of the inequalities it generates and its unsustainability due to a lack of cost control. In this context, our study examines the funding models for Diamond journals — academic journals which are published with no direct payment made by the readers (unlike the subscription model) nor by the authors (author pays model). The aim of this work is to test the feasibility, as well as the desirability of a direct or explicit funding model for Diamond journals, something which is almost non-existent at present. We have two objectives here: on one hand, to understand the current Diamond journal funding arrangements and constraints, and on the other hand to propose specific arrangements for funding Diamond journals by research funders.

https://hal.science/hal-04133000v1

"Transformative Agreements and Their Practical Impact: A Librarian Perspective"

This case study aims at describing how transformative agreements (TAs) have affected our profession with new tasks and workflows at two university libraries in Sweden, namely Karolinska Institutet University Library and Södertörn University Library. TAs are one of the mechanisms by which scientific publications are made open access; they involve moving libraries’ contracts with publishers from payment to read toward payment to publish. We will summarize the status and progress of open access in Sweden, in particular the significant growth of TAs over a short time span. We will then focus on describing how TAs have affected our everyday work and what new tasks they have imposed. We will share our experiences and point out things we find challenging, for example, we will explore questions about eligibility, the verification process, publication types and title changes during the contract period. We will also give some recommendations on how we would prefer the workflows surrounding the TAs to be. Finally, we will share our conclusions and comments about the impact of TAs on the publishing landscape and speculate about what will happen next.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.612

"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