Open publishing in Lippincott and Taylor & Francis journals continues

7.3.2023

Open publishing was suspended in early 2023 as the negotiations were prolonged. Open access publishing has now restarted in the journals of both publishers.

New FinELib agreements with Wolters Kluwer’s Lippincott journals and Taylor & Francis journals give the researchers from the subscribing institutions the right to publish their articles open access without additional payment. The agreements cover both years 2023 and 2024.

It's estimated that FinELib’s agreements with these publishers now cover all articles from eligible researchers until the end of 2024.

Agreement with Taylor & Francis covers open publishing in almost 2,000 hybrid journals published by T&F from the fields of social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The agreement also includes reading rights T&F Social Sciences & Humanities and Science & Technology Libraries.

Lippincott subscribers get access to approximately 250 paywalled medical journals. Researchers can also publish open articles free of charge in approximately 290 journals. The publication right applies to both hybrid and fully open journals.

Open access publishing included in new ACM and Nature Research agreements

7.9.2022

Two new FinELib agreements containing open access publishing rights came into effect in the summer: ACM and Nature Research.

The ACM agreement covers access to ACM Digital Library and open access publishing rights in ACM’s  journals and conference proceedings. The Nature agreement includes access to titles picked by the subscribing institution and the right to publish open access in all Research-titles.

Authors from institutions taking part in the agreements have the right to publish their articles open access without paying article processing charges. Articles that are accepted for publication during the agreement term are eligible for this benefit.

Both agreements are in effect until the end of 2024.

FinELib partners with the Open Library of Humanities

22.8.2022

FinELib and the not-for-profit Open Library of Humanities have signed a three-year (2022–2024) agreement that provides support for OLH through its Library Partnership Subsidy Model.

The partnership with OLH is FinELib’s first with a scholar-led diamond OA publisher.

Journals that have joined OLH include Glossa: a journal of general linquistics, Ethnologia Europaea, Architectural Histories as well as OLH's flagship journal, the multidisciplinary Open Library of Humanities Journal.

Participating Finnish institutions:

  • Abo Akademi University
  • University of Eastern Finland
  • University of Helsinki
  • University of Jyväskylä

Based in Birkbeck, University of London, Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open access publisher of 28 journals from across the humanities disciplines.

Its costs are covered by payments from participating libraries, with charges neither to readers nor authors.

For more information, see Open access publishing in Open Library of Humanities' journals

FinELib strikes open access deal with Frontiers

8.4.2021

The agreement allows participating institutions to benefit from a 10% national discount, streamlined submission and payment workflows, and other benefits.

The FinELib and Frontiers have announced a new three-year (2022-2024) open access agreement. The agreement is the FinELib's first with a fully open access publisher and allows participating institutions to choose from three invoicing schemes (invoiced individually, monthly, or prepayment).

While making it easier for authors to publish their work open access, the agreement also allows institutions to remain in full control as each APC will be verified before being paid. Further benefits include frozen maximum APCs for the duration of the agreement and improved transparency of OA expenditure through detailed reports.

Read Frontiers' press release here.

Participating institutions:

  • Aalto University
  • University of Lapland
  • National Defence University (incl. the military schools)
  • Tampere University including Tampere University Hospital
  • Abo Akademi University
  • Laurea University of Applied Sciences
  • Tampere University of Applied Sciences
  • Natural Resources Institute Finland
  • VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

FinELib pledges to support arXiv

16.3.2022

FinELib and arXiv have signed a three-year (20222024) agreement through which six new Finnish universities have committed to funding arXiv, currently promoted by SCOSS (The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) in its third funding cycle.

arXiv is a curated open platform and open access archive that currently hosts over 2 million scholarly articles.

Maintained by Cornell Tech and founded three decades ago, arXiv covers eight major subject areas including physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

The agreement is a testimony to the importance of arXiv to the Finnish and global scientific community.

Participating Institutions:

  • Abo Akademi University
  • Tampere University
  • Tampere University of Applied Sciences
  • University of Eastern Finland
  • University of Jyväskylä
  • University of Turku

Cell Press agreement enables open access publishing

22.2.2022

FinELib and Elsevier have signed a Read and Publish agreement for Cell Press journals for the term 2022–2024.

With the new agreement, researchers affiliated with the participating organisations can publish their articles open access without extra costs in about 40 Cell Press hybrid journals in the field of medical and natural sciences.

The agreement covers 10 FinELib member organisations, who yearly have published about 30 articles in total in Cell Press hybrid journals.

In addition, the agreement allows researchers and students to access Cell Press journals subscribed by the organisations.

More information on how to publish open access in Cell Press journals

The license agreement 2022-2024

More and more scientific articles available to all

16.9.2021

Researchers from Finnish universities and research institutions, can publish their articles open access thanks to the FinELib Consortium agreements. A total of 2929 open articles were published in 2020. The number of open access articles increases as more and more researchers utilise the open access benefits included in the consortium agreements. You can track the yearly development in the number of open access articles on FinELib’s new web page.

FinELib's website summarizes by publisher how many open access articles, have been published with the help of the scholarly journal agreements negotiated by the consortium. The information covers the number of open access articles since 2017, when the FinELib consortium first started negotiating agreements covering open access publishing.

FinELib agreements give researchers the right to publish articles open access free of charge or with a reduced article processing charge. The reduced charges are typically associated with fully open access journals. There are currently 12 agreements that contain an open access benefit. In 2020, the Finnish research community published altogether 5120 articles in the scholarly journals covered by the agreements, of which nearly 60% as open access articles. In the future researchers will be able to publish all their articles open access in many scholarly journals, with the benefits included in FinELib agreements.

FinELib has been able to negotiate an increasing number of agreements that contain terms for open access publishing as well as better terms for existing agreements.  More and more articles can be published open access in the future. The aim is that all research results are published open access at a reasonable cost, and agreements would be used to pay for open access publishing only and not for reading. Once full openness has been achieved, all research results are freely available to the entire scientific community and to citizens.

On FinELib’s Open Publications page, you can follow the number of articles published open access.

Follow-up of open publication elsewhere:

Open Science Monitor on the European Union website

Briefing Paper on Open Access Monitoring on Science Europe website

Open APC - a project that contains the author fee information of organizations in multiple countries

 

FinELib agreements open the results of science for all

12.4.2021

FinELib consortium concludes journal package agreements, which promote the openness of science, with scientific publishers. The goal is that the agreements cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) on behalf of the authors. In 2020, FinELib agreements enabled the publishing of nearly 2900 Finnish Open Access articles in the journals of various publishers.

In 2020 FinELib had 11 journal package agreements which enabled Open Access publishing of articles for the authors without APC or with a discounted APC. Thanks to the agreements about 2900 articles were published – 65% more than during the previous year.

During 2020, new agreements were negotiated for 2021 to increase the number of Open Access articles. The expectation is that the number of Open Access articles will double during the year 2021:

* estimate

Agreements covered an increasing number of articles

Depending on the publisher, the FinELib agreements contain different kinds of Open Access benefits for the subscribing organisations.

All article processing charges were covered by the subscription fees of three journal package agreements: Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), SAGE Premier and SCOAP3.

Springer Compact agreement was estimated to cover all Open Access articles, but publishing was so active that by December the benefits were used up.

100% Open Access publishing was not achieved in all journal packages. However, subscription fees covered the majority of the articles also in the following journal packages:

  • Wiley Online Library
  • Taylor & Francis Social Science & Humanities and Science & Technology
  • American Chemical Society (ACS)
  • Emerald Premier

Based on the FinELib agreement, researchers could have published a large part of their articles Open Access in the Wolters Kluwer Lippincott journals. However, only a few researchers used Open Access publishing benefit because the publisher's publication process made Open Access publishing difficult.

Resources with discounts on APC’s in 2020 were Elsevier SD Freedom (50% discount) and Science Advances (15% discount).

The various Open Access benefits described above affect the number of Open Access articles of all articles published in the journals covered by the agreements:

The share of Open Access articles published in the journals covered by the FinELib agreements in 2020.

Free Open Access publishing for researchers is increasing rapidly

As a result of the 2020 negotiations distinctly better Open Access benefits were achieved with Elsevier, Emerald and ACS in the new agreements that started in January 2021.

It is estimated that the Elsevier subscription fee will cover Open Access publishing of all articles from researchers of the subscribing organisations in the journals included in the agreement.

The subscription fees of Emerald and ACS now cover a distinctly larger part of the Open Access articles than during the year 2020: on the part of ACS, approximately all articles starting January 2021. On the part of Emerald, the same will be achieved in 2022.

Furthermore, with IEEE and Oxford University Press agreements containing Open Access publishing were successfully negotiated: for both, the subscription fee will cover approximately 100% of future articles.

In Wiley, Emerald, SAGE, ACS, and IEEE agreements Open Access publishing benefits cover both hybrid and fully Open Access journals. In other agreements, Open Access publishing is limited to hybrid journals only.

The Open Access benefits negotiated by FinELib are found here: Take Advantage of OA Benefits.

See more about FinELib agreements: Agreements.

Towards Open Access with transformative agreements

1.3.2021

FinELib consortium promotes open access publishing by concluding so-called transformative agreements with scientific publishers.

FinELib has negotiated transformative agreements for the following resources:

  • American Chemical Society (ACS)
  • Elsevier SD Freedom
  • Emerald Premier
  • IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)
  • Oxford Journals
  • RSC Read & Publish (Royal Society of Chemistry)
  • SAGE Premier
  • SCOAP3
  • Springer Compact
  • Taylor & Francis Library
  • Wiley Online Library

Transformative agreements are agreements between organizations or consortia and publishers. Their purpose is to:

  • switch from a business model based on subscription fees to a business model based on open access publishing services

  • move subscription fees to cover costs of open access publishing

  • function as transitional agreements when moving from subscription based agreements to open access publishing agreements

  • make the terms and conditions of agreements public

  • control the growth of total costs

  • make open access publishing possible for researchers with CC BY license which allows extensive reuse

  • enable a publication process which serves the needs of researchers and research organizations.

Open access publishing of research publications is directed by the policy of cOAlition S funders, Plan S Principles, and the policy of Finland's research community, Declaration for Open Science and Research. The latter commits the key Finnish research organizations to promoting openness of European science.

Open access publishing of research publications is directed by the policy of cOAlition S funders, Plan S Principles, and the policy of Finland's research community, Declaration for Open Science and Research. The latter commits the key Finnish research organizations to promoting openness of European science.

The cOAlition S funders (among others, Academy of Finland) require in Plan S that researchers make their scientific publications openly available to everybody.

One way, to fill the requirements of Plan S is to publish in a journal included in a transformative agreement. When defining the contents of agreements of this kind, cOAlition S refers to the ESAC’s (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges) description of transformative agreements.

Transformative agreements may contain individual journals, which do not meet the requirements of Plan S, for example, because the journal does not offer the CC BY license.

cOAlition S has published Journal Checker Tool to help researchers evaluate which publication channels fulfil the requirements of Plan S.

More information on agreements at FinELib’s agreements page.

Final report of the FinELib's APC-project out now!

26.2.2021

The report is the result of a project undertaken by the FinELib consortium in 2019–2020 to explore the motivations and challenges associated with the monitoring of APC (Article Processing Charge) expenditure among its member organisations.

The report is in Finnish but contains an Executive Summary in English which summarises the key conclusions of the project while also highlighting some of the actions Finnish institutions and stakeholders are urged to take to further promote the monitoring of APCs.

The report (Kirjoittajamaksut ja niiden seuranta: havaintoja ja kehitysehdotuksia) can be accessed here.

For more information, please contact: timo.vilen@helsinki.fi

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