OA to backfiles, for the first time

Absolutely gorgeous rhetorical moves here.

Explains library budget dilemmas better than most.

Sci-Hub has become foundational for scientific research. What if we didn’t need it at all?

Critics of scientific publishing had hoped for a bigger shake-up from the global crisis

George MacgregorScholarly Publications & Research Data, University of Strathclyde

Transformative agreement  (TA) is an umbrella term used to describe contracts between institutions and publishers intended to transform the current, primarily subscription-based, journal publishing model to a fully open access (OA) model. The idea originated in a 2015 white paper from the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), which posited that the current level of investment ($10 billion worldwide) is sufficient to fund the transformation to OA within existing publishing structures: a system in which 60% of the market is controlled by five publishers who maintain excessive profit margins.

It’s an exciting time in the OA book world because many experiments are coming to fruition. We’ve seen MIT’s recent D2O offering; Michigan has a new membership programme; punctum books and Open Book Publishers are on the go; Springer is piloting a scheme with Berkeley; and our own COPIM-grown Opening the Future (OtF) model is taking off at the Central European University Press, with a second well-known UK University Press set to launch an OtF programme soon.

Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), was the 2021 recipient of the Miles Conrad Award from NISO (National Information Standards Organization), and she delivered the annual Miles Conrad lecture at this year's NISO Plus conference. We spoke shortly after the conclusion of the conference.

Interesting and reasonably evenhanded analysis. Suggests that MDPI is an (impact-factor) pump-and-dump scheme.

After more than two years of negotiations, in March 2021 the University of California announced a transformative open access agreement with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher. This successful outcome is the result of UC’s faculty, librarians and university leadership coming together to stand firm on the goals of making UC research freely available to all and transforming scholarly communication for the better. The four-year agreement goes into effect on April 1, 2021, restoring UC’s direct online access to Elsevier journals while accomplishing the university’s two goals for all publisher agreements: (1)   Enabling universal open access to all UC […]