Transformative agreements
The past few weeks have seen a flood of transformative ‘read-and-publish’ agreements. Wiley has described its new four-year deal with Jisc, beginning this month, as ‘the most extensive UK transitional agreement to date’; the deal will enable researchers at affiliated institutions to read and publish in all Wiley journals at no cost to themselves; a similar three-year read-and-publish agreement between Wiley and FinELib, the Finnish consortium of higher education and research institutions, began last month.
Cambridge University Press has concluded a three-year read-and-publish deal with the Austrian Academic Library Consortium which will cover ten of the Consortium’s affiliated research institutions, including nine universities and one institute. It will enable researchers to publish publicly financed research articles in the Press’s hybrid and fully Open Access journals, while giving institutions read access to their chosen collection from Cambridge’s Full, HSS, STM or Med/Vet collections.
De Gruyter has signed two deals: a three-year agreement with Michigan State University will provide default open access publishing in De Gruyter journals and subscription access to the complete De Gruyter eJournal collection, while a deal with nine universities from the Netherlands will provide default open access in 305 hybrid journals and a 20% discount on 110 gold open access titles, along with subscription access to the complete De Gruyter eJournal collection.
SAGE has signed a three-year deal with Sweden’s Bibsam consortium, similarly providing read access to more than 900 SAGE journals, unlimited open access publishing rights in more than 900 hybrid journals including co-published society journals, and a 20% discount on APCS for around 150 pure Gold OA journals published by SAGE.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced an agreement with Louisiana State University which will provide researchers there with full access to ACS journals, and financial support for corresponding authors at the university to publish under an open access licence at more than sixty ACS journals during 2020.
Two large purely open access publishers have also announced impending agreements. Frontiers has signed a memorandum of understanding with Forschungszentrum Jülich that will ultimately enable researchers from any participating institutions within Germany’s Projekt DEAL to publish in any of Frontiers’ 79 open access journals, with the costs covered by their departments or central libraries. The agreement is expected to be implemented later this year. PLOS, meanwhile, has announced a two-year deal with the University of California, to be implemented this spring, which will see the university’s libraries pay the first $1,000 of article processing charges for its researchers who wish to publish in PLOS journals.
Partnerships
IOP Publishing will be working with Publons over the next twelve months to address three key challenges in peer review – recognition and transparency, diversity, and efficiency. Outputs from the partnership will include a report on reviewer motivations, initiatives to improve gender and geographical diversity in the IOP reviewer pool, and innovations including interacting with reviewers through WeChat.
Springer Nature, which last month announced that it would be extending its SharedIt content-sharing initiative to include conference proceedings, has announced a new phase of its long-term partnership with Pleiades Publishing, which began back in 1993. A new agreement will enable authors from thousands of non-translated journals to submit their articles seamlessly to thematic journal clusters within the Pleiades and Springer Nature collections.
A new partnership between Digital Science and PLOS will allow the latter to use Dimensions’ Analytics and API to monitor trends in the Open Access landscape and help shape their business development strategies.
New integrated OA portal from SAGE
SAGE has launched a new integrated single online platform to manage open access publishing for authors, consortia, libraries and funders across more than a thousand of its journals. The SAGE Open Access Portal brings together all its OA processes into a single system, enabling automated compliance with funder or national OA mandates and providing a fully integrated online APC payment system, automatically applying applicable discounts, waivers or taxes. Currently operational for all the publisher’s hybrid journals, it will soon be extended to include its purely Gold OA journals too.
New and changing journals
Cambridge University Press is launching a new open access journal, QRB Discovery, a sister title to the existing Press journal, the Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics.
Springer Nature has launched two new journals as part of its Nature Research Communications family: Communications Materials and Communications Earth & Environment.
Toxicology Research, the official journal of the British Toxicology Society and the Chinese Society of Toxicology, has moved from Royal Society of Chemistry to Oxford University Press.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.