Search

The second OASPA workshop in the Equity in Open Access series took place on 28 March 2023, with publishers, librarians, funders, and other stakeholders. Participants came from a wide range of countries: Austria, Bangladesh, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Kenya, Mozambique, Netherlands, Panamá, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. Participants built on the first workshop in which participants discussed why equity is important, current challenges to global equity, examples of good practice, and priorities for increasing equity in OA. In the second workshop we explored ways to increase equity in two categories of OA models: those where transactions are per-article or where prices are based on article volume, and those where there are no author fees and prices are de-coupled from article numbers. We also explored ways to reassure researchers around the world that OA publishing is as credible as other forms of publishing.

Libraries and publishers have a mutual obligation to ensure long-term preservation of the scholarly record - leveraging library expertise in preservation, publisher expertise in content production, and the author relationships and financial means of both parties. Agreements between the parties are good places to document these mutual obligations. These might be subscription agreements, open access publishing agreements, or agreements that blend the two. A review in 2022 revealed that digital preservation language in many existing agreements was vague, unclear regarding the precise content and time depth preserved, unnecessarily restrictive in terms of access and/or use, conflated post-cancellation access and long-term digital preservation and access, and was sometimes administratively burdensome to implement. It was also difficult to verify compliance with the agreements, and that the content was actually preserved properly. This paper clarifies the distinction between long-term preservation and post-cancellation access; recommends improved language to use in agreements; and offers guidance on how to negotiate the language into agreements.

In November 2021, with the support of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and cOAlition S, four ‘task and finish’ working groups were established. The authors facilitated and supported these groups. Each group was responsible for producing tools that will enable library consortia and small independent publishers to negotiate transformative agreements, which is to say, agreements that will enable the publisher to fully transition to open access. The first task and finish group developed shared principles for transformative agreements. The second developed a data template to enable smaller independent publishers to reach agreements with library consortia and libraries, while the third developed example licence agreements. These groups recognized that the implementation of a transformative agreement crosses a complex ecosystem of technology, processes, policies, automated functions and manual functions that relate to contract management, article submission and peer review, content hosting and dissemination as well as financial management. For this reason, a fourth group produced a workflow framework that describes the process in all its phases. The members of these four groups were volunteers from stakeholder communities including libraries, library consortia, smaller independent publishers and intermediaries. This article explains why these tools are needed and the process behind their creation. The authors have combined these tools into a freely available toolkit, available under a CC BY licence.

COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) Release 5 has brought many improvements to reporting usage of e-resources. This session covered the three main developments which a...

This article reports on the outcome of a project launched in September 2019 to develop an approach to implementing the price transparency principle of Plan S. It was clear from the outset that mobilising stakeholder engagement and support would be crucial to success. It was also clear that this would be a challenge. While funders, libraries, and library consortia were broadly supportive of the work, many publishers – both mixed model and OA-only – expressed significant concerns. A framework consisting of title, contextual, and price metadata emerged and is described within.

See RECORDING. Independent Society Publishers and Academic Publishers would like to enable Open Access transformative agreements, but find it difficult to do this at scale, especially when each library consortia requires different licence agreements, data and workflows. This project is to create shared principles, a model licence, a data template and minimum workflows, so that small publishers, libraries and library consortia can then use them to more easily conclude Open Access agreements.

This report was commissioned by the library of Delft University of Technology to provide a new vision for how it should manage access to, and publication in, scholarly journals. Information Power, the writers of the report, were asked to address the following strategic points Keeping the collection cost effective. Not only in terms of actual subscription costs but also the time needed by staff to administer the related licences and metadata. Maintaining a dynamic and responsive collection that relates to faculty needs and wider scientific trends, particularly interdisciplinary and cross-institutional research Providing a Collections Policy that is regarded as equitable and fair by faculty (and other stakeholders) Addresses whether there is a need for perpetual access Providing the library with its own sense of mission

Purpose Librarians need to measure returns on the investments that they make, and for digital content, the COUNTER Code of Practice for usage statistics is an important metric. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a viewpoint. Findings Release 5 of the Code of Practice has been developed to make it easier for publishers to be compliant. It can be adapted and extended as digital publishing changes over the years. Originality/value Release 5 consists of four master reports, a reduced number of metrics and additional attributes. These will enable librarians to roll up or drill down through reports with ease, eliminating the need for the kinds of special-purpose reports required previously.

Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation, and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers commissioned Information Power Ltd. to undertake a project to support society publishers to accelerate their transition to open access (OA) in alignment with Plan S and the wider move to accelerate immediate OA. This project is part of a range of activities that cOAlition S partners are taking forward to support the implementation of Plan S principles. The objective of this project was to explore with learned societies a range of potential strategies and business models through which they could adapt and thrive under Plan S. We consulted with society publishers through interviews, surveys, and workshops about the 27 business models and strategies identified during the project. We also surveyed library consortia about their willingness to support society publishers to make the transition to OA. Our key finding is that transformative agreements emerge as the most promising model because they offer a predictable, steady funding stream. We also facilitated pilot transformative agreement negotiations between several society publishers and library consortia. These pilots and a workshop of consortium representatives and society publishers informed the development of an OA transformative agreement toolkit. Our conclusion is that society publishers should consider all the business models this project has developed and should not automatically equate OA with article publication charges.

The relationship between libraries and society publishers has not previously been a close one. While transactions have in the past been mediated by third parties, larger commercial publishers or agents, there is now an opportunity for strategic new collaborations as societies seek to transition to open access (OA) and deploy business models compliant with Plan S. Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) commissioned Information Power Ltd to undertake to support society publishers in accelerating their transition to OA in alignment with Plan S. Outcomes demonstrate support in principle from library consortia and their members to repurpose existing expenditure to help society publishers to successfully make a full transition to OA. Principles to inform the short- and medium-term development of OA transformative agreements have been co-developed by consortium representatives and publishers to inform development of an OA transformative agreement toolkit.

Introduction Libraries have two roles essential to the IP balance: archiving the national memory and allowing the public and research community access to it. Any book dealing with the future of digital information would be incomplete without considering the issues of intellectual property (IP). Although the internet casts a new light on these issues, the principal problems are not new. In the 19th century the American publishing industry was quick to recognize that in sharing a language with the UK, it was easy to share its literature too. English texts were open to piracy, and it was easier and more profitable to appropriate an English text than to pay an American author. This had a depressing effect on the US publishing industry, and for decades American authors expressed their frustration at being underpaid because of the availability of cheap pirated copies of UK publications. Equally, renowned British authors such as Charles Dickens were paid nothing for the many thousands of copies of their books sold in the USA. Indeed, Dickens, while on a reading tour of the USA, made many pleas for international copyright laws. His fans, enjoying access to cheap copies of his books, were not impressed; for example, they paid the equivalent of 6 cents per copy for a book such as A Christmas Carol , which cost $2.50 in the UK (Vaidhyanathan, 2001). It was not until the 1890s that international copyright agreements began to resolve the situation. Arguably, since the late 19th century copyright law has evolved to protect the intellectual property of authors and creators, to cultivate a vibrant creative arts industry, and to allow for fair dealing on the part of the buying or reading public. Fair dealing is the ‘right’ to make a copy from an in-copyright work without permission from or payment to the rights holder, if that copy is for non-commercial research or educational purposes. The only requirement is to acknowledge the source of the copied work. Most individual copying by researchers at universities for academic purposes is done under the fair dealing provisions.

COUNTER provides a Code of Practice for recording and reporting the usage of electronic resources. The Code of Practice evolves as the information environment develops to meet the needs of the vendors, publishers, and libraries. COUNTER usage reports are an important tool for libraries, recording how often a given resource has been accessed and thus making a vital contribution to collection development and decision making. COUNTER is now developing of its next release of the Code of Practice, with the objective of addressing changing needs and making the Code of Practice less complex, so that providers of content and of usage analysis tools find it easier to use.

Traditional citation and download metrics have long been the standard by which we measure the use and value of scholarly articles. However, these methods neglect the usage and real‐world impact of newer technologies to access, store, and share downloaded scholarly articles. This session’s speakers will share the results of interviews, focus groups, and an international survey with 1,000 scholars to investigate the ways in which they now access, store, share, and use downloaded scholarly articles. By identifying and measuring what traditional metrics fail to examine, the Beyond Downloads project attempts to capture a more complete picture of the use and value of scholarly articles, which is critical for librarians, publishers, and vendors to understand in developing scholarly tools and services. Complete usage can no longer be measured by traditional means alone. The speakers will discuss the findings of their research and the implications for metrics that take into account scholars’ changing access, reading, and sharing behaviors.