New UKRI open access policy would cost £300m a year, say Publishers Association
The new open access policy proposed by UK Research and Innovation Report (UKRI) would cost publishers almost £300m a year, putting some smaller publishers out of business and making monograph publishing unsustainable for others, according to a report (PDF) commissioned by the Publishers Association. The total loss to UK publishing, it suggests, would be in the region of £2bn over the next six years, with research intensive UK universities seeing an increase in expenditure of £130-140m annually.
Meanwhile, more than 50 publishers, including Springer Nature, Sage, Wiley, Cambridge University Press, and Emerald, have signed a joint letter expressing their inability to support in its current form the Rights Retention Strategy that forms one of cOAlition S’s routes to compliance. The strategy ‘ignores long-standing academic freedoms and will work against the shared objective of a more open and equitable scholarly ecosystem’, according to the publishers; by providing a free substitute for published articles, they suggest, it removes the ability of publishers to charge for their services and is therefore not financially sustainable.
New transformative deals
Jisc has agreed transformative deals with two more publishers. An agreement with Oxford University Press will run until 2023 and will provide researchers at participating institutions with read access to OUP journals and the ability to publish their research in OUP’s hybrid and fully OA journals. A twelve-month pilot ‘publish-and-read’ deal with the BMJ will give Jisc member institutions full read access to the BMJ’s standard collection of 28 specialist journals, and researchers at those institutions the opportunity to publish funded articles open access in the BMJ’s Standard Collection of journals.
SAGE has announced transformative agreements with three consortia. A three-year deal will see researchers at German Academic Institutions gain coverage for article processing charges in SAGE’s 900+ hybrid journals, a discount on article publishing charges for SAGE’s 150+ pure Gold OA journals, and access to the SAGE Open Access Portal. A two-year deal with the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries offers the same benefits but with unlimited open access publishing rights in those 900+ journals, while a three-year deal with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network adds read access to the 900+ hybrid journals.
Springer Nature has agreed a transformative deal with Conferenza dei Rettori delle Universita Italiane (CRUI-CARE), which represents more than 90 Italian academic and research institutions. The deal will last until the end of 2024 and enables researchers at participating institutions to publish OA in Springer Nature’s portfolio of over 2,200 hybrid journals, including its Palgrave and Adis journals, and gain read access to all Springer, Palgrave and Adis subscription journal content.
IOP Publishing has signed three-year transformative deals with Swedish consortium Bibsam and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The deal with Bibsam offers researchers read access to all IOPP and eligible partner journals and unlimited OA publishing under a CC-BY licence; the VTT deal offers publication in 58 hybrid titles and read access to all IOPP journals.
Tulane University Libraries have agreed publish-and-read deals with Cambridge University Press and the American Chemical Society which will give researchers the ability to read and publish openly their research in 400 Cambridge journals and 65 titles published by ACS.
Appointments
Scholarly communications digital preservation service CLOCKSS has announced that Alicia Wise, formerly of Jisc, the Publishers Association, Publishers Licensing Services, and Elsevier, will take over from Craig Van Dyck as executive director from May.
Dr Hylke Koers has been appointed by STM as Chief Information Officer for its new STM Solutions initiative. Launching next month, the initiative will develop and manage shared infrastructures and collaborative services for the scholarly communications community.
Taylor & Francis has appointed Professor Brad Fenwick as Senior Vice President of Open Science and Innovation.
In brief
The ChemRxiv preprint server for the chemical sciences will be hosted on the Cambridge Open Engage platform from the second quarter of this year, offering users access to an author dashboard where they can view the status of their content uploads, upload new versions of their preprints, and respond to user comments.
Kudos has launched a new service for scholarly publishers and societies. The Kudos Showcase for Publishers aims to help publishers widen impact for their published content by providing a new, highly visual discovery channel enabling non-academic readers in particular to engage with scholarly content.
A new white paper from Springer Nature, Exploring researcher preference for the Version of Record, examines researcher attitudes to the growing range of different versions of articles – such as preprints, accepted manuscripts, and the final published version of record – and finds an overwhelming preference for the version of record.
De Gruyter has launched a new digital research platform. Build by 67 Bricks, which last month announced a new agreement strengthening its position as a strategic partner to the Royal Society of Chemistry, the new platform will improve access to over 110,000 scholarly books and 800,000 journal articles from De Gruyter, its imprints, and its publisher partners.
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has announced that it will be using the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink for Scientific Communications service to manage its new Community Action Publishing model, which aims to remove article processing charges from its publishing model. PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine are the first PLOS journals using the system.
Berlin-based maths publisher EMS Press has launched a new content platform providing partners with access to full texts and all metadata for indexing, reviewing, and data mining, including the first articles published through its new Subscribe To Open model.
Cabells is now a full member of the United Nations SDG Publishers Compact, becoming one of the first non-primary publishers to do so.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.