The Specialised Information Service for International and Interdisciplinary Legal Research has initiated a project together with the publishing house Peter Lang and Knowledge Unlatched (based on the OPEN Library Political Science) to build an Open Library IT-Law - the project Open Access IT Law.

Under the terms of the agreement, Peter Lang undertakes to publish ten legal monographs in Gold Open Access per year for an initial period of three years starting in 2019. Due to the financial contribution of FID, parts of the total costs are already covered.

As a foretaste are already five titles from the back list provided open access and via the OA repository of the FID retrievable (Open Access IT Law).

More information can be found on the project page and in the At-a-Glance document.

If you would also like to participate in the financing of Open Access IT Law, please contact Catherine Anderson from Knowledge Unlatched directly.

This blog post is part of a series that explains the study “APCs — Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?” of OA2020-DE.

In the last blog post, we analyzed by means of multivariate regression whether and how the level of actually paid APCs is explained by

• the citation impact (SNIP) of a journal,
• whether the journal is hybrid or not,
• which publisher issues the journal,
• for which subject area the journal is relevant, and
• the year of the payment.

Moreover, we checked whether the effect of citation impact differs for open-access vs. hybrid journals. Now, we will discuss the conclusions and their implications for the financial aspects of the open-access transformation.

Read more…

This blog post is part of a series that explains the study “APCs — Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?” of OA2020-DE.

In the last blog post, we analyzed the relationship between the variables with the help of simple, statistical measures. The results indicate that there is positive relationship between APCs, the citation impact (SNIP) and whether the journals is hybrid (costlier and with more impact) or open-access (cheaper and with less impact). However, to state a causal relationship, one needs to run a careful regression analysis.

Read more…

Press Release

Göttingen. 14 scientific institutions have joined the national opt-in consortium for the central payment processing of APCs for articles of all journals of the open-access publishing house Copernicus Publications. This is an important signal for the open-access community and libraries because it makes it clear that open-access transformation – in this case of acquisition funds – includes open-access publishers.

Based on the concept of the National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE, the Lower Saxony State and University Library Göttingen and the publisher Copernicus Publications have jointly developed and set up the consortium. The term is for two years (2019–2020), and eligible are all universities and scientific institutions that are also eligible for participation in a national or alliance licence.

The consortium enables corresponding authors affiliated with the participating institutions to publish free of charge for them in the 43 gold open-access journals in the fields of geography, engineering and life sciences for two years. The articles are financed by a prepayment deposited at the beginning of each year. They will be published under a CC-BY license, including the automatic delivery of the repositories of the consortium participants with the XML metadata and the full-text PDF.

Contact:

Lower Saxony State and University Library Göttingen, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany; nationallizenzen@sub.uni-goettingen.de

Copernicus Publications, Bahnhofsallee 1e, 37081 Göttingen, Germany; publications@copernicus.org

Press Release

(This blog post was published first by Kai Geschuhn at the ESAC blog).

Germany’s Projekt DEAL and the publisher John Wiley & Sons have entered a ground-breaking transformative agreement, in line with the objectives of the Open Access 2020 initiative.

Under this new agreement, all authors affiliated with 700 academic institutions in Germany will retain copyright and their accepted articles will be published open access in Wiley journals. Almost 10,000 articles by German researchers are published a year in Wiley journals, constituting around 9% of the publisher’s total output. The agreement also grants students and faculty read access to the full Wiley journal portfolio including backfiles starting with 1997. The national-level agreement is based on a “publish and read” model in which fees are paid by institutions—not for subscriptions but for open access publishing services.

The agreement will be made public in a month’s time and an English-language FAQ will be released by the Projekt DEAL working group.

Read the official press release.

This blog post is part of a series that explains the study “APCs — Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?” of OA2020-DE. After discussing the summary statistics of each variable separately, we present several plots and simple statistical measures showing relationships between two variables. However, keep in mind that finding correlation between two variables does not necessarily imply causality. To state a causal relationship, one needs to run a careful regression analysis, which will be presented in the next blog post.

Read more…

This blog post is part of a series that explains the study “APCs — Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?” of OA2020-DE.

With data from OpenAPC, which is part of the INTACT project at the Bielefeld University Library, Germany, we analyzed the determinants for APCs actually paid (in contrast to catalogue prices).

Read more…

OA2020-DE prepared a report that is a first step forward to answer the question whether the large-scale open-access transformation of scientific journals is a financially viable way for German research and higher-education institutions. Usually, article processing charges (APCs) are charged to the submitting/corresponding author’s account for publishing scientific articles in open access. In Germany, the DFG-funded publication funds accept the costs for APCs up to EUR 2.000. With the ongoing open-access transformation, APCs are gaining importance as relevant business model for open-access journals. For a financial assessment, it is of utmost importance to predict the APC-levels after a comprehensive journal flipping — both the average APC and the distribution of APCs. To predict APCs, we need to know the factors determining APC-levels today. This is the core of the paper.

With data from OpenAPC, which is part of the INTACT project at the Bielefeld University Library, Germany, we analyzed the determinants for APCs actually paid (in contrast to catalogue prices). Price-determining factors could be the reputation and quality perception of a journal proxied by its citation impact, whether the journal is open access or hybrid, the publisher and the subject area of the journal. We are going to present and discuss the core results of the study in several blog posts. For the statistical and technical details, we refer to the full report.

Schönfelder, Nina (2018). APCs — Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model?. Universität Bielefeld. doi:10.4119/unibi/2931061

Blogpost 2 - APCs — Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model? The database.

Blogpost 3 - APCs — Mirroring the impact factor or legacy of the subscription-based model? Descriptive statistics.

Workshop on open-access transformation focuses on framework conditions

On 17 and 18 October 2018, an open-access transformation workshop organised by OA2020-DE took place for the second time. The aims of this workshop were to network the signatories of the "Expression of Interest" of the OA2020 initiative, to win new supporters and to exchange information on concrete activities to implement the open-access transformation. This time, the participants mainly consisted of open-access officers and library directors. The first day focused on strategies for open-access transformation at national and international level, while the second day focused on concrete transformation processes at research institutions and university libraries (Agenda).

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Quality standards in science and research are important, as the reporting on fake science (better: junk science) has made clear once again (see here). This not only applies to journals and conferences, but also to books. Therefore we developed "Recommendations on quality standards for the open access provision of books" together with Knowledge Unlatched and the publisher transcript. The aim is to provide authors, publishers and libraries with a practical guideline describing criteria for the production, distribution and financial participation in the open access provision of books. It is important to know which services can be offered or expected, both for publishers who provide open access services for books and for libraries who want to enable an open access position for books through financial participation.

In order to facilitate the entry into this process, especially for smaller publishers, we propose implementing the recommendations in two phases. Above all, quality standards in the areas of formats, metadata, accessibility, licenses, costs and distribution are relevant in the entry phase to the open access position of books. Phase two expands these standards and adds quality inspection criteria (peer review), as well as text and data mining.

The updated recommendations are available in German and English:

• Empfehlungen zu Qualitätsstandards für die Open-Access-Stellung von Büchern (Updated version)
• Recommendations on quality standards for the open access provision of books (Updated version)

Many thanks to the representation of German-speaking university publishers, which has actively contributed to the further development of the standards and also deals with the topic itself.