Open Access – DigitalKoans

“Big Ten Open Books: An Interview with Kate McCready (BTAA) and Charles Watkinson (UM)”

Authors Alliance has had a longstanding interest in helping authors see their older books reinvigorated with new life by making them available online for free on an open access basis. One of the most exciting initiatives working on OA for backlist books is the Big Ten Open Books program. This post is based on a set of questions we posed to Kate McCready (Program Director for Open Publishing, Center for Library Programs at the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and Charles Watkinson (Director of University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan) about what the program is and how it works.

https://tinyurl.com/49mudpa8

“Lyrasis, Big Ten Academic Alliance Libraries, and California Digital Library Receive Grant to Advance Diamond Open Access in the United States”

The grant will support the project Mapping U.S. Diamond Open Access Journals, which will conduct the first national mapping of Diamond Open Access (OA) publishing in the United States. Diamond OA journals are peer-reviewed publications that are free for both authors and readers and operate without commercial profit motives. The project will illuminate the decentralized U.S. landscape of Diamond OA journals, surface sector-wide challenges, and provide actionable recommendations in support of sustainable, non-commercial scholarly publishing. By identifying infrastructure, investment, and policy needs, the project aims to produce actionable recommendations to guide institutions, funders, and coalitions in creating sustainable, field-informed investments that strengthen openness and resilience in scholarly communication.

https://tinyurl.com/2vdfajk9

Reparative Description and Metadata Remediation Planning at the University of Michigan Deep Blue Institutional Repositories

This report shares ongoing metadata remediation work on The University of Michigan Library’s Deep Blue Repositories, or the “Deep Blues,” primarily focused on Deep Blue Documents. Deep Blue Documents is a repository that has been accepting research outputs since 2006. Currently, it contains about 160,000 deposits of items from 1863 to the present, with hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. Deep Blue Data launched in 2016, and as of Fall 2025 has approximately 2,000 deposits.

https://tinyurl.com/mtkh3f7m

“Preprint Policies Across Journals and Publishers in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology”

Preprints have the potential to accelerate knowledge dissemination and promote transparency in ecology and evolutionary biology. However, concerns about journal policies regarding prior publication may discourage researchers from preprinting their manuscripts. Therefore, we identified 230 eligible ecology and evolutionary biology journals, published by 69 different publishers, and assessed both their journal- and publisher-level preprint policies. At the journal level, 119 (51.7%) of the 230 journals included preprint policies in their author guidelines—either through journal-specific policies (109, 47.4%) or by directly referencing their publisher’s preprint policies (10, 4.3%). Overall, 116 (97.5%) of these journals were supportive of considering preprints for publication. At the publisher level, 26 (37.7%) of the 69 publishers had explicit preprint policies, all of which supported considering preprints for publication. There were 38 (16.5%) journals without journal- or publisher-level preprint policies. While most journals and publishers were supportive of considering preprints for publication, instructions for authors, such as acceptable locations for posting preprints, timing of preprint posting relative to manuscript submission and requirements to link preprints to final published articles, were lacking. These findings highlight opportunities for ecology and evolutionary biology journals, along with their publishers, to clarify and refine their preprint policies and instructions for authors.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.0524

Advancing Equity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication: Findings from the Consultation on a Global Diamond Open Access Framework

This report presents the results of the survey “Consultation on a Global Diamond Open Access Framework,” conducted online between September 2024 and January 2025 by UNESCO. This survey received nearly 2,900 responses from across 90 Countries. It aimed to understand current practices, structural challenges, and future aspirations regarding community-led, non-commercial scholarly publishing. The process was open, multilingual, and voluntary. Although not statistically representative, the responses reflect the real-world experiences and values of a broad spectrum of stakeholders.

Findings demonstrate widespread support for Diamond Open Access as a viable, values-driven model of scholarly communication. Respondents associated it with principles such as equity, inclusion, multilingualism, and the public good. However, the survey also revealed persistent obstacles, including limited funding, inadequate infrastructure, lack of institutional recognition, and barriers to multilingual participation. Many of these challenges are structural, reflecting broader imbalances in knowledge production and access.

https://tinyurl.com/mpreznnd

“Untangling the Future of Diamond Access: Discussing Quality Standards for the Re-Communalization of Scholarly Publishing”

This paper examines the future of Diamond Open Access as a non-commercial, community-driven model for scholarly publishing that challenges the growing marketization of research dissemination. Drawing on recent initiatives such as DIAMAS, Craft-OA, and the Diamond Future project, it analyzes tensions between academic autonomy and the heteronomy imposed by commercial publishers. The study reviews existing definitions and standards for diamond journals, highlighting efforts in Europe and Latin America to establish common criteria for quality, sustainability, and visibility. It emphasizes the need to move beyond universal rankings and impact factors toward context-sensitive, federated indexing systems-such as Latindex, SciELO, Redalyc, Biblat, and DOAJ-that reflect the diversity of academic communities. The paper argues for a re-communalization of scholarly publishing through institutional support, reliable indexation, and recognition of multi-indexed journals as legitimate indicators of quality. Ultimately, it proposes reclaiming academic control from corporate infrastructures by reinforcing autonomy, multilingualism, and bibliodiversity in global research evaluation and publication practices.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17552531

Springer Nature: “Strong Business Performance in the First Nine Months of 2025. Full Year 2025 Guidance Reiterated”

Research, the company’s largest segment, reported revenue of €1,112.6 million (9M 2024: €1,044.4 million) with underlying growth of 7.0% driven by the Journals portfolio, with particular strength in Full Open Access (FOA). The number of published articles rose by more than 10% across the whole portfolio and over 25% in FOA journals.

In the first nine months, Springer Nature completed its 2025 contract renewals and the new contract renewal season, which began in September, is progressing as expected. During the first nine months of 2025, Springer Nature has signed 18 transformative agreements to further accelerate the shift to open access, with one new agreement signed in Q3, bringing the total of transformative agreements in place to 84.

Book revenues grew in the first nine months in both digital and print book formats. Print growth reflects the comparison against a weaker performance last year and positive phasing of distributor orders in the third quarter of 2025. Digital continues to represent around 70% of book sales. Services revenues benefited from good growth in text and data mining (TDM) solutions for corporate customers, offset by a more challenging market for talent-related services in the US.

The company continued to invest in a range of initiatives to support growth and ensure research integrity. It also maintained a focus on developing AI tools to transform the publication process, provide more value to our communities and create new revenue streams. Nature Research Assistant, an AI tool designed to speed up some of the most time-consuming parts of the research process, has been well received and is now being used by more than 8,000 beta users.

Adjusted operating profit in Research grew 8.2% in underlying terms to €351.5 million, exceeding the growth in revenue during the period.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3nm2t4

“Secondary Publishing Rights for Canadian Open Access Implementation”

This paper examines the potential of Secondary Publishing Rights (SPR) as a legal solution to safeguard Green Open Access (OA) and promote free and global access to Canadian research. SPR grants journal article authors the right to deposit a version of a finished article in an institutional or disciplinary repository, regardless of publisher agreements. If implemented in Canada, SPR will empower researchers, allowing them to make their work OA while also providing them with an easy path to ensuring compliance with OA funder mandates. In this paper, we compare SPR to alternatives like Rights Retention Strategies (RRS) and collective licensing, highlighting the variations of SPR implemented in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria. Adopting SPR in Canada will significantly improve public access to research, strengthen Canada’s global research impact, and create a more equitable scholarly publishing landscape.

https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v8i1.23101

Paywall: Library Publishing: How to Launch, Enhance, and Sustain Your Program

This book largely follows the three parts set out in the book’s title: launching a library program, enhancing that program, and sustaining the program. Over the course of this book, it will become clear that there is not an absolute chronology for the process. Depending on the specific context, some parts of the “Enhancing” chapters will be essential to launching a program, and concepts discussed in “Sustaining” chapters will be important considerations in both launching and enhancing a program. Indeed, most of the authors saw their chapters as belonging in the “Sustaining” section, as program longevity was an important part of their efforts to launch or enhance their program.

https://tinyurl.com/7rm6hak3

“When the Sky is Not the Limit: Managing Capped Open Access Agreements”

This paper features a dialogue between a consortium, two large research university libraries, and a large commercial publisher on the opportunities and challenges of setting up cost-neutral open access publishing agreements and managing capped allocations. The authors provide perspectives on the role of capped agreements in their negotiations, campus communications, workflows, and business processes as they navigate how to make open access publishing agreements work for everyone—consortia, universities, libraries, authors, researchers, and publishers.

https://tinyurl.com/bdf8y6y7

“Review of Interactive Open-Access Publishing with Community-Based Open Peer Review for Improved Scientific Discourse and Quality Assurance”

Scientific discourse and quality assurance can be improved by open-access (OA) publishing with public peer review and community discussion. Over 25 years, the viability of this approach has been proven by the interactive OA journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) and 18 other journals published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) and its scientific service provider Copernicus Publications. The success of the EGU journals reflects the benefits of community-driven, interactive OA publishing, including high scientific quality and impact, efficient self-regulation, low cost, and financial sustainability. Since 2001, the EGU has published over 50 000 journal articles, 60 000 preprints and 250 000 comments, utilizing and integrating different OA financing models (green, gold, diamond/platinum). The EGU journals with multi-stage open peer review are linked to the OA repository and interactive community platform EGUsphere and to the virtual scientific highlight magazine EGU Letters, integrating different levels of scientific communication and exchange. The EGU publications combine multiple features of open science, including different forms of open peer review and community evaluation with open-access, open data and open-source elements tailored to the needs and preferences of different disciplines. Indeed, the EGU pioneering approach to transparent peer review has spread to other leading publishers, including the Nature publishing group. We review the approach, achievements and future perspectives of interactive OA publishing (including transformative/institutional agreements and AI/ML tools) and its contribution to a universal epistemic web that captures the scientific discourse and comprehensively documents what we know, how well we know it and where the limitations are.

https://tinyurl.com/ypkk7upm

Embracing the Complexity of ‘100% OA’: From Percentage to Participation Creators

The open access movement has achieved remarkable progress over two decades, reaching over 50% of research articles and conference papers by 2023. Yet we now face a new challenge: growth is slowing, and the remaining transition appears more complex than the progress achieved so far. This position paper acknowledges an uncomfortable tension: any solutions we can hypothesise today feel uncertain because we face problems that operate at different scales, require different types of interventions, and exceed any single organisation’s capacity to solve.

Feedback from OASPA stakeholders has identified key priorities including removing barriers so all scholars worldwide can publish and share openly, enabling open access for every subject area, and enabling scholarly communication between speakers of different languages. These priorities share a fundamental thread: they concern participation and go beyond the long-standing focus on access.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17348122

“Scholarly Communication Work: On the Ground Perspectives”

This survey investigates the experiences of scholarly communication workers in North America, with a total of 282 responses. Previous studies on scholarly communication work in academic libraries have tended to focus on organizational structure and necessary competencies. This study aims to put the focus back on workers’ own experiences on the job, to better understand the contributing factors to burnout and attrition that can arise for those in these positions. Five main areas are investigated: newness of the position, scope of the work, support and resources, feelings of one’s expertise being unvalued or dismissed, and the impact of administration. The study concludes with recommendations for library administrators on how to fortify a more sustainable environment for scholarly communication workers.

https://tinyurl.com/435a8ewd

Paywall: “Assessing the Academic and Societal Impact of Open Access: Bibliometric and Altmetric Analyses”

The findings show that Bronze OA [free to read and no CC license] is associated with higher levels of bibliometric and altmetric indicators. Hybrid-Gold OA demonstrated citation and altmetric gains that closely approached those of Bronze OA, with the highest levels of mentions. In contrast, Closed Access exhibits the highest usage metrics. Additionally, a greater number of authors corresponds with higher bibliometric and altmetric values. The relationship between academic impact and societal engagement has strengthened in recent years, particularly for Open Access publications. . .. Furthermore, publications with high academic impact, strong societal engagement, and multiple authors are more commonly associated with Open Access status. The association between societal engagement and academic impact appears strongest among high-impact publications, whereas author count shows greater explanatory power among lower-impact work.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05436-6

“Analyzing the Citation Impact of Predatory Journals in the Health Sciences”

Objective: Predatory journal articles do not undergo rigorous peer review and so their quality is potentially lower. Citing them disseminates the unreliable data they may contain and may undermine the integrity of science. Using citation analysis techniques, this study investigates the influence of predatory journals in the health sciences.

Methods: The twenty-six journals in the “Medical Sciences” category of a known predatory publisher were selected. The number of articles published by these journals was recorded based on the information from their websites. The “Cited References” search function in Web of Science was used to retrieve citation data for these journals.

Results: Of the 3,671 articles published in these predatory journals, 1,151 (31.4%) were cited at least once by 3,613 articles indexed in Web of Science. The number of articles that cited articles published in predatory journals increased significantly from 64 in 2014 to 665 in 2022, an increase of 10-fold in nine years. The citing articles were published by researchers from all over the world (from high-, middle-, and lower-income countries) and in the journals of traditional and open access publishers. Forty-three percent (1,560/3,613) of the citing articles were supported by research funds.

Conclusions: The content from articles published in predatory journals has infiltrated reputable health sciences journals to a substantial extent. It is crucial to develop strategies to prevent citing such articles.

https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2025.2024

“‘Yes’ to Transparent Service Fees, ‘No’ to Fees That Charge Authors to Exercise Their Rights”

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) have introduced new fees targeting authors who exercise their right to self-archive accepted manuscripts under a CC BY license. cOAlition S opposes these charges because they penalize authors for complying with open access policies.

This blog post by Bodo Stern (Chief of Strategic Initiatives at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and Rachel Bruce (Head of Open Research Strategy, UK Research and Innovation) proposes an alternative: replace these rights-infringing fees with a transparent, service-based model. Would such a fee-for-service model for appraisal services be a better way forward?

https://tinyurl.com/2pahyya5

Recommendations for Scholarly Publishers and Journal Editors to Mitigate Barriers to Open Access Publishing for Researchers with Weak Institutional Ties

The recommendations aim to provide a basis for keeping the publication process as free as possible from barriers for authors with weak institutional ties, in order to enable an inclusive and epistemically just scientific publication system. The recomendations were developed at the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology in the course of the IDAHO project (IDentificAtion of Hurdles to Open Access Publishing for Researchers with Weak Institutional Ties: Epistemic Injustice in Scientific Publishing). The project focused on the obstacles faced by researchers with weak institutional ties in open access publishing. The recommendations were derived based on qualitative and quantitative studies with weakly-affiliated researchers and scientific journals editors

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17418990

“Impact of Open Access on Academic Visibility: A Systematic Review of the Literature”

The evidence shows that OA enhances academic visibility but in a heterogeneous manner. Green OA and preprints consistently increase citations and accelerate readership, while Gold OA produces mixed outcomes: positive in medicine and biology, but neutral or negative in economics, library science, and translation studies. Altmetrics highlight OA’s broader societal impact, especially in the humanities and social sciences, where freely available works attract attention from social media, blogs and policy documents. International collaboration strengthens the OA advantage, while disparities remain across regions, particularly in Africa and Asia. Publication costs, repository infrastructure and editorial practices further influence outcomes.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2025-0216

“Comparing Companion Open Access Journals to Their Traditional Journal Counterparts”

Background

Many traditional journals have launched companion open access (cOA) journals with similar scope and aims. These journals seek better article dissemination through removal of the paywall and use of article processing charges (APCs). Traditional journals often suggest transfer to their cOA journal, leaving authors with a decision to accept transfer and pay an APC or resubmit elsewhere. We aim to compare costs and impact of these journals to better inform authors.

Methods

The top 15 U.S.-based traditional journals within medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and OB/GYN were identified based on 2023 impact factor. Those with cOA journals were included, and all publication data between 2011 and 2023 were extracted. Citation counts were compared using Poisson regression; author demographics were analyzed using multivariable logistic regression.

Results

There were 14 traditional journals with cOA counterparts, constituting 52,232 publications from 36,577 authors. cOA articles had half the citations of traditional publications (9.4 vs 18.2) and collected an estimated $35 million in APCs. Female and low/middle income country (LMIC) authors were more likely to publish in cOA journals (aOR = 1.23, 1.14, respectively).

Conclusions

Authors publishing in companion open access journals incur higher publication costs, and yet, receive fewer citations per publication.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2025.2575211

“Faculty Use of Open and Affordable Course Materials over Time: Rethinking Value and Impact”

This study examines long-term faculty engagement with open educational resources (OER) and affordable course materials following their participation in a library-funded course redesign initiative (2016–2024). A survey was administered to 138 awardees, with a 55 % response rate. The research assessed whether faculty continued to use, revise, or abandon the open and affordable materials they initially adopted and explored broader impacts on teaching practices. Most respondents continued using open and affordable materials or updated them with other low-cost options. Notably, 21 faculty redesigned additional courses without further funding. Results suggest that open and affordable course materials became increasingly integrated into faculty teaching practices over time. The study also considers the concept of cumulative student savings as a metric for program success, raising questions about how to define and track long-term impact. Findings highlight the importance of sustained library support to encourage continued use, innovation, and scalability of affordability initiatives in higher education.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103155

“The Impact of Transformative Agreements on Reading and Publishing Behavior”

Academic librarians often work to educate and guide authors, fostering trust within the ever-changing processes of academic publishing. This article analyzes collection development decisions by assessing the outcomes of a six-year period of contracts between a big five publisher and an academic library that culminated in a transformative agreement. Funded institutional authors were surveyed to investigate the impact of the publish portion of the transformative agreement on their open access choices. Authors were more likely to choose hybrid publishing in cases where they had not considered the option. The library’s position, situated between the needs of authors and publishers, is increasingly one of limited funds and limited authority.

https://doi.org/10.58997/fx80dy21

Publishing Futures: Working Together to Deliver Radical Change in Academic Publishing

This is a collective action problem of major proportions. Academic institutions, professional societies, research funders, and academic publishers all have important roles to play in the development of a more equitable and sustainable model going forward. There is every reason for optimism: The report is filled with examples of sector initiatives to change academic incentive structures, innovative open-access arrangements, potential alternative publishing platforms, and concrete suggestions for better-supporting peer review. — Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge

https://tinyurl.com/y252kdra

“Diamond Dreams, Unequal Realities: The Promise and Pitfalls of No-APC Open Access”

If diamond OA is to fulfil its equity promise, it cannot rely solely on idealism. . . .

Several policy recommendations emerge from recent research:

Shared Infrastructure: Pooled publishing platforms and shared technical services can reduce costs and raise quality across many small journals.

Institutional Funding: Universities and governments should integrate diamond OA support into core research funding, rather than relying on short-term grants.

Indexing Inclusion: Repositories, indexing services, and bibliometric systems must adapt to better represent regionally focused and non-English diamond journals.

Capacity Building: Training in digital publishing, metadata standards, and editorial best practices can help journals meet global technical criteria.

https://tinyurl.com/4d6seuc4

“Alternative Explanations for a Publication Paradox with Gold Open Access”

The discussions mentioned previously on self-citation and APC alleviation could lead, albeit not inevitably, to the disconcerting hypothetical scenario below. Gold OA publishers invested in expediting their journals’ editorial process to gain popularity and submissions. The way the journals operate enhances citations, particularly journal level or publisher level self-citations, which subsequently gain and inflates the journals’ impact factors, thus promoting even more submissions and citations. Any financial constraint on the part of authors imposed by APCs could potentially be alleviated by several mechanisms including discounts for individuals who review manuscripts, which heighten the activities of those that seek financial defrayment in publishing their own papers, thus potentially compromising stringency if not integrity. The attainment of an impact factor by any of these journals would attract a critical mass of authors that would ensure a mutually sustaining if not propagating loop of submissions, reviews and publications.

https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2025.e160424

“APC Waivers and Ukraine’s Publishing Output in Gold OA Journals: Evidence from Five Commercial Publishers”

This study examines the effect of article processing charge (APC) waivers on the participation of Ukrainian researchers in fully Gold Open Access (Gold OA) journals published by the five largest academic publishers – Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley – during the period 2019-2024. These publishers were selected because, in response to the full-scale war launched against Ukraine in 2022, all five introduced emergency 100% APC-waiver policies for Ukrainian authors. Using bibliometric data from the Web of Science Core Collection, the study analyses publication trends in Ukrainian-authored articles in fully Gold OA journals of these publishers before and after 2022. The results show a marked post-2022 increase in Ukraine’s Gold OA output, particularly in journals published by Springer Nature and Elsevier. Disciplinary and publisher-specific patterns are evident, with especially strong growth in the medical and applied sciences. The findings underscore the potential of targeted support measures during times of crisis, while also illustrating the inherent limitations of APC-based publishing models in fostering equitable scholarly communication.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12134