Feature
Covid-19 has been something of a double-edged sword for open access (OA). While the pandemic has highlighted the importance of all things open, its relentless virus continues to swallow up more and more of the community’s scholarly budgets, making affordable routes to paying for OA as important as ever.
Liam Earney, executive director, digital
resources at Jisc, couldn’t agree more. Pointing to the swift deposits of the very latest virus research from Imperial College London into its repository, he says: ‘This is just one example of how the pandemic has demonstrated the importance of open access, open science and more. We’ve seen a strong restatement of universities’ commitment to open science in response to the pandemic.’ But, as he also highlights, institution budgets have been extraordinarily stretched during this time. ‘Beyond a loss of international student funds, [universities] have had to deliver online and offline learning experiences, ensuring for example, textbook access, digital learning and software applications – all institutions have had to respond to any number of pressures,’ he adds.
“Institution budgets have been extraordinarily stretched during this time”
Given this, the ongoing Elsevier contract negotiations with 157 UK universities clearly come at a critical time. Overseen by Jisc since February this year, UK universities started negotiations with Elsevier to reduce costs to levels they can sustain and to provide full and immediate open access to UK research. Elsevier is the world’s largest academic publisher and is the biggest venue for UK scholarly publishing. Negotiations precede the end of the UK’s largest subscription deal – the Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals agreement – a five-year contract that ends on 31 December 2021 and only has a small OA component. Indeed, as Earney says: ‘It’s probably fair to say that we would have liked a much larger open access component at the time.’ In the meantime, key UK publishers, including Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, SAGE, Oxford University Press and IOP Publishing have been busy signing so-called read-and-publish contracts. In these ‘transformative agreements’, publisher payments for reading and publishing are bundled into a single contract, rather than being addressed ad hoc by the author choosing OA publishing. As such, transformative agreements should make publishing processes easier and more financially viable, and help both institutions and authors tip the balance of publishing output towards open access. At the time of writing, Elsevier is the
only remaining UK publisher not to have signed a transformative agreement in the UK. According to Earney: ‘Negotiations are constructive and hard... We have a very ambitious set of objectives and are under no illusion that these will be easy to achieve.’ However, the recent landmark, four-year
open access deal between Elsevier and the University of California (UC) bodes well. Back in February 2019, the mammoth ten- campus system boycotted Elsevier over high journal costs and open access fees. Come July 2020, negotiations returned and in March this year, a four-year deal was signed in which all research with a UC lead author published in Elsevier’s hybrid and open access journals will be open access, by default. Elsevier CEO, Kumsal Bayazit, described
the agreement as a ‘real win for world- class researchers across the UC system... we can test and learn from author choices and enable a sustainable transition to universal open access to UC research.’ Only time will tell if the UK sees a similar
result. But as Earney points out: ‘Building on other agreements we’ve seen in Northern Europe and now in California, Elsevier’s position on open access seems to have changed. The University of California is research intensive, and is a big consortium to reach such an agreement with – this is telling and gives us a degree of optimism.’ Earney is also keen to highlight
how, during their negotiations, Jisc and partners are not asking Elsevier for anything that other publishers haven’t already committed to. ‘From our perspective we are seeking to bring our Elsevier agreement into alignment and consistency with other agreements we have in place with major publishers,’ he said. ‘If we can’t reach an acceptable conclusion by the end of this year, we will continue to push until we do have an acceptable arrangement.’ If Elsevier signs an agreement, then alongside the existing UK university read- and-publish deals, around 80 per cent
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August/September 2021 Research Information
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