Springer Nature’s agreement with the University of California portends US adoption of a publishing practice that is becoming commonplace in Europe.

A 2018 review estimated that only 28% of all scholarly publications are open access. But the pandemic has heightened the need for full and immediate open access to research and has thrown into sharp

This article maps patterns of interest in key terms associated with copyright and online culture in the US context. Using exploratory factor analysis of data fr...

This article analyzes the UK’s first “read and publish” journals agreement. The Springer Compact Agreement pilot ran from 2016 to 2018. The authors outline the methodology and data sources used to undertake a detailed analysis of the agreement. This includes the number of open access articles published, the number of author opt-outs and rejected articles. Institutional savings (or cost avoidance), and the financial implications resulting from the number of opt-outs and rejected articles are also discussed. The value of articles published and cost per download for non-OA content are also covered. The agreement, at the consortia level, has constrained the total cost of publication—during the three years, the HE sector has avoided paying additional costs of €20,000,800 ($22,761,688) for publishing OA by paying the single combined fee that capped publication costs at 2014 rates. All institutions taking part in the Springer Compact agreement published OA articles equivalent to or in excess of their total 2014 APC spend between 2016 and 2018. By 2018, 30 percent of institutions published OA articles to the value of or in excess of the combined fee paid to Springer. The article concludes with a number of recommendations for future agreements and considers compliance with Plan S guidelines.

The preservation of the scholarly record has been a point of concern since the beginning of knowledge production. With print publications, the responsibility rested primarily with librarians, but...

A first critical evaluation of the Swiss Read and Publish Agreement with Elsevier

The fact that open access and open science are tied together in one contract, gives Elsevier an important advantage

Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and...

The COVID-19 pandemic is significantly impacting universities and higher education institutions, reducing budgets and presenting new design challenges that will fundamentally alter how research and…

The space agency is not only required by law to give you access to many of its materials, but it also really wants you to use them. Here's why.

For Elizabeth Gadd, the Covid-19 pandemic makes it clear that long standing issues with academic publications need to be addressed quickly and definitively.

Copyrights establish intellectual property in cultural goods, such as music, literature, and science. Intended to encourage creativity, they can however also cr

One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it’s just badly distributed. This is one of the core problems with APCs; they don’t distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution.

This Perspective article analyzes whether the US National Institutes of Health open access policy, which from 2008 forced open access on thousands of papers, had a detectable effect on the "demography" of biomedical journals.

Subscribe to Open converts gated access journals to open access using existing library relationships and subscription purchases. Institutions that already know and value Annual Reviews content simply continue to subscribe—there are no APCs or other additional costs—and as long as subscription revenues are maintained, the year’s volume will be published open access and the back volumes made freely available. If subscription revenue is insufficient to cover costs, for example as a result of institutions deciding to “free ride”, the journals will remain gated access. Thus, Subscribe to Open is a subscription offering, but one that empowers libraries to maximize the impact of their collection budgets by supporting the open access publishing of highly valued content.