Germany’s Projekt DEAL and the publisher Springer Nature have - like DEAL and Wiley one year before - entered a ground-breaking transformative agreement, in line with the objectives of the Open Access 2020 initiative.

Through the agreement, authors affiliated with the 700+ German academic and research institutions which are part of Projekt DEAL, will be able to publish their accepted manuscripts immediate (gold) open access in both Springer Nature hybrid and fully open-access journals, with the relative costs managed centrally by their institutions. The agreement is expected to see well over 13,000 articles a year from German researchers published open access, making it the largest of its kind. Dated 1 January 2020, the agreement provides open-access publishing services and full reading access to Springer Nature journals to scholars and students from across the German research landscape.

The signed agreement will be fully published on the Projekt DEAL website in conjunction with the start of the sign-up process for German institutions, towards the end of January 2020.

Read the official press releases of the HRK and Springer Nature.

Shaping sustainable open-access financing with collective approaches

Author/Article Processing Charges (APC) have established themselves as the standard form of financing open-access journal articles for the promotion of open-access publications. These are being supported by an increasing number of funding institutions. In addition, the funding of book publications according to a similar scheme by means of book-processing charges (BPC) is establishing itself. Both, however, have their limits, both in terms of the selection and level of funding as well as the funding mechanisms (which authors / institutions pay, which market distortions arise when individual publications are funded, what effects does APC dominance have on diversity in the publication market). A further challenge for open-access transformation lies in the often narrow limits and difficult coordination processes of existing institutional, regional or, at best, national funding opportunities.

In order to discuss these and similar aspects together, around 40 people from the fields of university libraries, research institutions, publishers, booksellers and learned societies came together for a workshop entitled "The engagment of the many" at the Open Access Days 2019. The following concrete questions were up for discussion:

1. Which cooperative approaches are regarded as particularly promising and why?
2. Have there already been any experiences with participation in cooperative financing approaches? If so, how do they turn out? And what are the associated risks?
3. What framework conditions need to be considered in order for cooperative approaches to be successful?

After an introductory lecture on collective approaches to open-access publishing, the above questions were intensively discussed with the participants in the form of a World Café.

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A proposal to implement tender procedures and introduce competition between publishers in the context of national open-access consortia

Open-access transformation of scholarly publications is a declared goal of Coalition S and the OA2020 initiative and their supporting institutions. To reach a large-scale open-access transition of journals, established subscription-based journals should flip to open access. Currently, transformative agreements are favored to achieve that aim, like the agreements that have been negotiated by the project DEAL with the three biggest international publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley) for several years. Transformative agreements’ design and conditions are bilaterally negotiated between publisher and library consortia. Often, previous subscription expenditures serve as a starting point for negotiations. In addition, the DEAL-Wiley Read-and-Access agreement takes over APCs for publications in pure open-access journals with a 20% discount on list price. The DEAL-Springer agreement is supposed to be signed under similar conditions.

But what can we expect after the tipping point, when transformative agreement worldwide lead to a widespread flip of scholarly journals to open access? Which actors will become important, how agreements will be shaped, which price-setting mechanisms will be applied, how will be the funding of open-access publishing organized—and finally—will we success in breaking the ever increasing subscription costs with open access, or will we be faced with a new APC price spiral?

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How can learned societies successfully implement open-access transformation?

Since the mid-1990s, increasing digitalization has changed the entire scientific communication. At the latest since 2003, the year of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the topic of open access has been on the agenda for everyone to see. Plan S has once again increased the pressure on publishers to gear their business models to changing scientific communication behaviour and science policy demands for open access and open sciene. This also affects learned societies as publishers of own scientific journals and book series. Against this background, the National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE invited various learned societies and specialised information services (FIDs) to the Göttingen State and University Library of Lower Saxony for a transformation workshop on 4th and 5th November 2019. The focus of the workshop was on reports by learned societies that already publish their journals in open access and even perhaps have completed a transformation process, as well as on various options for support from research funding agencies, the specialised information services and libraries (Agenda).

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OA2020-DE publishes transformation calculation to determine funding requirements for open access at selected German universities and research institutions

The transformation of subscription-based scientific journals into open access will in all likelihood lead to changes in the financial burden on scientific institutions in Germany. At present, APCs are the dominant business model for open-access journals that are indexed by relevant, international bibliographic databases. As this or comparable business models become widely applied to journals and the open-access transition progresses, expenses for journals will be reallocated. In order to react adequately to the open-access transformation within one's own organisation and to play an active role in shaping it, it is necessary to make reliable estimates of the financial relief or burdens with regard to the expected total institutional APC expenditure of one's own institutions. The project OA2020-DE has prepared a report to illustrate how institutions can cost-model and prepare for the transition.

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As part of this year's International Open Access Week, we would like to refer you to a publication by the Austrian Open Access Project AT2OA: The guidance document "Open Access Publication Funds - Establishment and Funding Conditions" was created to provide a framework for the development of funding conditions for Open Access Publication Funds especially for institutions planning to set up an Open Access Publication Fund. In addition, it is meant to support a critical review of the funding conditions of existtng publication funds.

In keeping with this year's theme "Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge", the paper offers a number of recommendations for standardising funding conditions with the aim of providing a clear framework for scientists, increasing cost efficiency and communicating uniform standards to Publishers.

You can find the guidance document on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2653724.

The second round of the OPEN Library Political Science is also well on its way to becoming a complete success!

Since the 14th of October there are 17 full and 2 sponsoring light pledges for the second run of transcript OPEN Library Political Science 2020. On the one hand, more than half of the minimum participants are reached and, on the other hand, the response shows a continuously high level of interest in transparent and valid models for open-access transformation, especially in the humanities and social sciences.

Therefore, we are very pleased about the participation of the following libraries:

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OA2020-DE research report on the number of publications and distribution of scientific articles in the context of open-access transformation at German research institutions published

The aim of the open-access transformation is to convert the standard business model for scientific publishers from subscription to open-access publishing. This will involve changes in the business processes and billing logic, which in future will focus on the individual publication. The DEAL contract with Wiley is a first step, which will be followed by others (see the DEAL-Springer-MoU). Of course, the burdens and reliefs resulting from this new calculation model will be unequal and, above all, distributed differently than in the previous subscription model and this will result in requirements for a financial and structural reorganization of the individual scientific institutions. Supporting scientific institutions in this is one of the tasks of the "National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE" project, in which the report presented here has been prepared.

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Invitation to cooperation - ENABLE! Libraries, Publishers and Authors for Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Libraries have long been familiar with collective structures for the joint acquisition of content in the form of consortia. However, crowdfunding models for the open-access provision of publications are new territory for libraries (and publishers), since this model is not only about joint financing, but above all about joint enabling of open-access publications. Libraries thus become part of a constellation of actors in the publication process that also includes publishers and authors.

Our common concern is therefore the development of an inclusive open-access culture, supported by all those involved, which ties in with the tried and tested and at the same time opens up to new ideas. To ensure this, we need an exchange of experience, new forms of cooperation and changed financing models. We would like to see the diversity of actors in the world of humanities and social sciences publishing as a wealth and to use it to create something that offers advantages for all those involved and offers libraries and publishers a solid perspective for the future in a new partnership constellation.

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wbv Media is paving the way for Open Access in the field of education to the benefit of scholars and librarians

[Press release]

A collaboration with OA2020-DE and Knowledge Unlatched

Bielefeld/Berlin, September 3rd 2019: wbv Publikation – a division of wbv Media GmbH & Co. KG – is launching, together with the National Open-Access-Kontaktpunkt OA2020-DE, the project „OPEN Library Erwachsenbildung, Berufs- und Wirtschaftspädagogik“. Thanks to a cooperative financing model, the initiative will allow for 20 frontlist titles in the fields of Adult Education and Vocational & Business Education to be published Open Access as of 2020. Knowledge Unlatched will coordinate the funding efforts.

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