UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher - March 16, 2021

UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher: UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher

"The University of California today (March 16) announced a pioneering open access agreement with the world’s largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, making significantly more of the University’s research available to people worldwide — immediately and at no cost. The deal will put more UC research into the hands of individuals across the globe at a time when international collaboration to fight COVID-19 has illuminated the value of open access to scientific findings.

The agreement is the largest of its kind in North America to date, bringing together UC, which generates nearly 10 percent of all U.S. research output, and Elsevier, which disseminates about 17 percent of journal articles produced by UC faculty. The deal will double the number of articles made available through UC’s transformative open access agreements.

“This groundbreaking agreement will allow for more open, equitable access to information,” said UC President Michael V. Drake, M.D. “As more universities and research institutions support open access, scientific knowledge will advance at an unparalleled pace.”

...

"Under the four-year deal, all research with a UC lead author published in Elsevier’s extensive portfolio of hybrid and open access journals will be open access by default. It is the first such agreement to include open access publishing in the entire Cell Press and Lancet families of journals, which are considered among the world’s most prestigious scientific and medical titles. University researchers will also be able to read articles published in Elsevier journals."

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Green, Gold, Diamond, Black – what does it all mean? - Academic publishing - Oct. 22, 2018

 

Green, Gold, Diamond, Black – what does it all mean?

Academic Publishing•Oct 22, 2018

 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0173.0089

Lucy Barnes  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1425-6985

There’s a lot of jargon surrounding Open Access publication, and as with all jargon it can confuse and obfuscate. Here is a simple glossary:

Diamond / Platinum	Immediate Open Access publication by the journal or book publisher without payment of a fee. Copyright may be retained by the author and permission barriers to share or reuse are generally removed. OBP fits this description: our authors retain their copyright, and we recommend this as best practice. We recommend a CC BY licence for all our books, unless an author chooses a more restrictive licence.
Gold	Immediate Open Access publication by the journal or book publisher. In some cases, a fee is charged. Copyright may be retained by the author and permission barriers to share or reuse are generally removed.
Bronze	The content is free to read and/or download on the publisher’s website, but it is not published under an open licence that permits sharing or reuse. The publisher is able to withdraw access at any time. This form of so-called ‘Open’ Access is often used to make content free to read for only a brief period, perhaps immediately after publication or in response to a catastrophic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since there is no open license it is not, in fact, Open Access at all.
Green	A version of the publication is archived online, e.g. in a repository. It does not include any of the work typically carried out by the publisher, such as e.g. copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, indexing, metadata tagging, marketing or distribution. It is usually not listed on the publisher’s website. It can be freely accessed but sometimes only after an embargo period, and there can be barriers to reuse. The author usually does not retain the copyright.
Black	A publication that is not openly licensed, or for which reuse rights have not been granted, which is shared online illegally (e.g. via Sci-Hub).
Hybrid	‘Hybrid’ is usually applied to journals. A hybrid journal is a subscription journal in which some articles are made Open Access on payment of a fee. This model has attracted particular criticism for its expense and its vulnerability to abuses such as ‘double dipping. Some book publishers offer chapter-level Open Access, particularly for collected and edited volumes. These are sometimes referred to as ‘hybrid books’.
Gratis	Open Access that is free to read, but there are barriers to reuse.
Libre	Open Access is free to read and permission barriers are generally removed. Source:   https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/green-gold-diamond-black-what-does-it-all-mean/

OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings - March 9, 2021

 

OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings

 Bosman, Jeroen;  Frantsvåg, Jan Erik;  Kramer, Bianca;  Langlais, Pierre-Carl;  Proudman, Vanessa

Project manager(s)

 Mounier, Pierre

Project member(s)

 Becerril, Arianna; Bjørnshauge, Lars;  Redhead, Claire;  Torny, Didier

Context
From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape.

Presentation
The study undertook a statistical analysis of several bibliographic databases, surveyed 1,619 journals, collected 7,019 free text submissions and other data from 94 questions, and organised three focus groups with 11 journals and 10 interviews with hosting platforms. It collected 163 references in the academic literature, and inventoried 1048 journals not listed in DOAJ.

The results of the study are available in the following outputs:

• References Library - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562816
• Journals Inventory - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562828
• Dataset - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4553103
• Findings Report - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4558704
• Recommendations Report- DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4562790

Findings:

• A wide archipelago of relatively small journals serving diverse communities
• OA diamond journals are on the road to full compliance with Plan S
• A mix of scientific strengths and operational challenges
• An economy that largely depends on volunteers, universities and government

Source;  https://zenodo.org/record/4558704#.YEfWjGhKhaQ

Related identifiers:

Supplementary material

• 10.5281/zenodo.4562790 (Report)
• 10.5281/zenodo.4553103 (Dataset)
• 10.5281/zenodo.4562816 (Other)
• 10.5281/zenodo.4562828 (Other)

Springer Nature Transformative Open Access Agreement - Dec. 17, 2020

 In June 2020, the University of California (UC) and Springer Nature announced that they have entered into a groundbreaking transformative open access agreement, the first such agreement Springer Nature has established in the United States, and the largest transformative open access agreement in North America to date.  The agreement will enable UC authors who publish with Springer Nature to make their research freely available to the world to read, and will also expand UC’s access to Springer Nature’s subscription journals. Through the agreement, the UC libraries are providing funding to support open access publishing fees for UC authors who publish with Springer Nature journals (including fully covering those fees for authors who do not have research funds available for this purpose) by redirecting funds previously devoted to subscription fees. In addition, the agreement adds reading access to more than 1,000 journals in Springer Nature’s portfolio, along with perpetual access rights to all journals for which there is read access. 

Agreement Basics

This four-year agreement runs from 2020 through 2023, and incorporates open access publishing in support of UC’s mission. In addition, it expands UC’s reading access to 1,000 more Springer titles, and upholds the university’s goal to manage its costs for academic journal subscriptions responsibly.  

I have a paper that was published with Springer in 2020.  Will that be covered by the agreement?

Unfortunately, we are unable to apply this agreement retroactively to papers accepted for publication in 2020. Before articles could be included under the agreement, we needed to formalize the workflow and contract details. 

The publishing aspects of the agreement will be implemented in two phases. 

Phase I: to begin in January 2021 —  Open access with UC libraries contribution to open access publishing fees 

Phase II starts in 2022 and involves the integration of Nature branded journals into the open access publishing part of the agreement

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Open Library of Humanities - September 17, 2020

Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a sustainable scholar-led consortial funding model for Gold Open Access in the humanities without publication fees.

"It is a charitable organization dedicated to publishing world-leading open-access humanities scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges. Launched in 2015, its free-to-read, free-to-publish model was set up to revolutionize the field of open access publishing. Five years on, the sustainable business model has attracted nearly 300 supporting institutions, with further revenue generated through hosting on our in-house open source publishing platform Janeway, enabling it to establish a thriving platform of 28 peer-reviewed open access journals. Its mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities - for free, for everyone, forever."

 

Wired - Universities Step Up the Fight for Open-Access Research - June 16, 2020

Universities Step Up the Fight for Open-Access Research

Today’s deal between the University of California and publisher Springer Nature is a big milestone on the path to dismantling paywalls around academic journals.

"University of California officials have announced their intention to make a deal with Springer Nature, the world’s second-largest publisher, to begin publishing the university system’s research as open-access by default.

The deal starts in 2021 for a large number of the company’s journals—and puts UC on the path, at least, to do so for all its journals within two years, including its most prestigious ones, like Nature."

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Science advisors call for open access to COVID-19 research - March 13, 2020

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of Science and Technology Policy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 13, 2020

President Trump’s Science Advisor and Government Science Leaders from Around the World call on Publishers to make all COVID-19-Related Research Publically Available 

Publically Available Research and Data is More Important than Ever as we Combat the COVID-19 Outbreak

Today, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Member of President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier, and government science leaders including science ministers and chief science advisors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom are asking publishers to make all COVID-19-related research and data immediately available to the public. 

“We, as national leaders on science policy, applaud the efforts of researchers to understand and prevent the infection and spread of COVID-19. We also greatly appreciate the funders and publishers who play the important role of supporting, reviewing, and communicating research outcomes and making publications and data available to the global community for scientific research and public awareness.

“To assist efforts to contain and mitigate the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic, basic science research and innovation will be vital to addressing this global crisis. Given the urgency of the situation, it is particularly important that scientists and the public can access research outcomes as soon as possible.  The countries listed below urge publishers to voluntarily agree to make their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and the available data supporting them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central and other appropriate public repositories, such as the World Health Organization’s COVID database, to support the ongoing public health emergency response efforts,” the government science leaders wrote in the call-to-action.

Science leaders requested that existing and new articles be made available in machine-readable format to allow full text and data mining with rights accorded for research re-use and secondary analysis. This will allow researchers to apply artificial intelligence to answer critical questions and identify trends and relevant information in their efforts to characterize this novel virus and address the global health crisis.

Please find the full transcript to the scholarly publishing community attached.

For more information about the Coronavirus, please visit:https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html.

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