Feature
Alicia Wise g
of UK research output will be covered by a Jisc negotiated OA agreement. ‘We’ve now got to the point where we have agreements with most of the big publishers and now we can push on to work with that large number of smaller, but equally important publishers,’ says Earney. ‘The finishing line will be in sight, and we can start to actively plan for a fully open access future from a UK perspective.’ Still, not everyone is keen on the recent
raft of read-and-publish agreements. Founded in 2007, Frontiers is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed scientific articles. According to its website, as of 2020 it had published 185,000 articles across 103 journals, had one billion article views and downloads, and Scimago statistics indicated it was the fifth most cited publisher. However, as Fred Fenter, executive
director, says: ‘A lot of the time, read- and-publish deals have very little true transformative potential but are often wrapped in the language of Plan S. I remember hearing about Plan S [with colleagues] and we were all saying, “Yes, there’s finally a movement, a systemic shock”,’ he adds. ‘But Plan S has largely been derailed and distracted by all the discussion around transformative agreements.’ For his part, Fenter believes
transformative agreements are concentrating the market with publishers that are able to negotiate such agreements, while libraries and researchers are not receiving real cost- savings. At the same time, he reckons costs are becoming less transparent with ‘complicated’ read-and-publish agreements obscuring the detail behind the deals. ‘I cannot help but think some of
these transformative agreements are a 6 Research Information August/September 2021
“Elsevier is the only remaining UK publisher not to have signed a transformative agreement in the UK”
commercial tactic to extend the status quo of maintaining revenue streams of the large publishers for another five years,’ he adds. ‘And when this time is over, they may shrug and say, “well five years wasn’t realistic for a full transformation to open access”.’ Fenter’s colleague Stephan Kuster, head of institutional relations, concurs, and highlights how institutions, funders and academic institutions need to adhere to the Plan S principles. ‘If a transformative agreement is considered to be compliant to Plan S as a transition of four years, then you just don’t need to renew that agreement after those four years,’ he says. ‘Swedish libraries [have already said] they are doing this.’ Kuster also believes that more
agreements with fully OA publishers, that are already compliant with Plan S, need to take place to balance the OA landscape: ‘If these two things happened then we could reach the tipping point – maybe not by 2024 but in the next five to six years. Otherwise... it’s more kicking the can down the road for another five years.’ Both Kuster and Fenter believe that
pure OA publishers, as well as smaller publishers, are being sidelined when it comes to negotiating agreements, as
Fred Fenter
libraries are devoting resources to larger players. ‘I’ve heard other publishers say that when they contact a library to discuss an agreement, [that library] says their mandate is to negotiate with the five largest publishers,’ says Fenter. ‘We all feel that we need to get a seat at the table, so we can negotiate these deals with institutions.’ Fenter’s sentiments on the struggles of publishers beyond the big five are not a world away from those of Alicia Wise, director of Information Power and co- author of the recently published How to enable smaller independent publishers to participate in OA agreements. The report looks at the challenges
faced by smaller independent publishers when negotiating and implementing OA agreements with consortia/libraries. Since its publication, seven key stakeholders including Jisc, cOAlition S, Lyrasis and the Center for Research Libraries, have signed an agreement to support the transition of smaller independent publishers to sustainable, equitable and immediate open access publishing models. As Wise and colleagues point out, these publishers lack the resources and scale of the largest publishers. They also suggest more care is needed from libraries and consortia to ensure independent society publishers and university presses are not irreparably damaged. ‘[Smaller publishers] sometimes struggle to get the time with libraries and consortia, because consortia in particular have always prioritised the largest publishers for understandable reasons,’ says Wise. ‘But now OA agreements are bundling together subscription spend and open access expenditure, it’s getting critical for smaller players to get that time with consortia.’ Wise also highlights that this will raise
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