Supporting the transition to open access publishing - an update

Alongside this, we have been working with the sector through our strategic groups to define and design the conditions that will support open scholarship during and after the OA transition.

As part of our work to support our funders’ policies, most notably UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), we have rapidly scaled-up our negotiations to put in place agreements that provide UKRI-funded researchers with routes to OA publishing and that allow these funds to be used to support these arrangements.

We are now at a point where around 80 per cent of UK output can be published openly via a Jisc agreement. Key to our negotiations are equity and affordability as set out in the sector's requirements of our members. This means working with publishers to forge sustainable routes to OA that are available to all researchers regardless of institution, discipline, or publication venue.

As the most used publication venue for UK researchers and the largest agreement by spend, reaching an agreement with Elsevier that delivers full and immediate OA at an affordable and reduced fee was a priority for the sector.

Another priority has been working with society and smaller publishers to help them develop OA agreements that are easy to administer and that deliver full and immediate OA. Following the OA policy announcement, we contacted all publishers of UKRI-funded research to strike OA agreements that offer researchers simple and cost-effective routes to open access. So far, we have contacted more than 375 publishers and negotiated close to 100 agreements. See an overview of Jisc’s negotiations with publishers. Our publisher survey (which remains open) has allowed us to tailor our approach. The agreements we’ve reached in support of the UKRI policy reflect a variety of OA models and, in some cases eg Emerald, include the delivery of manuscripts to institutions via Publications Router.

More recently, we’ve pivoted to securing routes that guarantee compliance now, such as ‘green by exception.’ This is where the publisher agrees to amend their existing green OA/self-archiving policy by granting UKRI-funded authors (by exception) the ability to deposit articles under Route 2 of the policy (pdf).

We prepared guidance material for publishers on the new policy and also created a resource that institutions can use to check the status of negotiations with publishers not currently included in the Journal Checker Tool or Sherpa services.

For our existing agreements including our larger read and publish agreements, we’ve been working to ensure that review articles are covered under the agreement and negotiated options for excluded titles. As the sector’s updated requirements for transitional agreements (TAs) state, agreements should be uncapped but where current agreements include a cap, we have confirmed with relevant publishers that articles funded by UKRI and Wellcome be prioritised.

As well as focusing on brokering agreements that cover the remaining 20 per cent of UK research, we need to ensure that all the agreements we’ve struck perform as expected and allow as many institutions as possible to participate. Workflows are a key area of focus and we’ve worked hard to reduce the friction in processes so that more content is published OA, not behind paywalls. For TAs this involves close scrutiny of publishers’ proposed workflows for article approval, often with groups such as the RLUK OAPP group. For compliance via Route 2 of the UKRI policy (pdf) we’ve provided standardised text for publishers to use on their websites and in author agreements to quickly indicate compliance, saving time for the author.

These agreements are not the end point, and their aim should be to transition to models more appropriate to an open access environment with fees that represent the publishing services delivered and the value that publishers, institutions, and researchers bring to scholarly publishing. Working closely with the sector we will continue to ensure that these agreements provide value and increased opportunity for institutions and funders during the OA transition.

Further information

Supporting UKRI-funded researchers, universities and research organisations to navigate available open access publishing options