The evolution of the OA policy landscape is showing no signs of rest. With the implementation of plan S just months away, many of the legacy academic and scholarly publishers are busy amending their agreements with universities to ensure that they are compliant with plan S. Since UKRI- including all of the UK’s Research Councils- and others funders such as the Wellcome Trust are signatories of plan S, there is a clear intention for integral stakeholders to progress the existing OA landscape that has already been heavily shaped by existing policies.

What does this mean? 

The plan S principles intend to bring about “make full and immediate open access a reality.” Whilst the Green route to open access is explicitly supported, much of the orientation of the initiative is framed around traditional publication through journals, and in particular through the Gold route. 

Various business models support Gold OA publication. The APC (article processing charge) model has been the most widely implemented model by many of the legacy publishers. This means that the funding of Gold open access publication often relies on a payment on a per-article basis.

However, as universities traditionally pay subscriptions to publishers for access to scholarly materials, such monies have not been relieved from existing costs in the scholarly communication workflows. Indeed, universities may well have an increased total cost by the inclusion of APCs due to the simultaneous payments for access and publication within the same hybrid title, a phenomenon often referred to as ‘double dipping’. 

For funded research, access to funds to cover APCs is often provided in order to meet their stated mandates around Gold OA publication. However, for research that is not produced as a result of grants from specific funders may feel have more limited access to publish via the Gold method in journals of their interest due to a lack of funding to cover high APC costs. 

Changing practices 

As such, plan S requires some publishers to amend their operations and the deals that they offer to universities. The University has started to take advantage of some of these ‘transformative agreements’ that cover both the traditional access aspect of the publisher’s offering, but also a Gold OA publishing aspect. Such transformative deals were already offered by publishers such as Springer, and the University maintain their read and publish deal.

The University has recently signed Wiley’s read and publish deal, meaning that we can support our researchers to publish via Gold OA with Wiley without incurring APCs (please follow the links for further details on some of the limitations of the deal.) This means that works published through these deals are freely available to all immediately upon publication without barriers to access via the internet. The works are published under Creative Commons licenses (which we will generally recommend a preference for CC BY 4.0 in order to maximise reuse value and optimise the potential for increasing impact, but we will have a new blog post on this for you very soon!)  

The University is currently addressing other appropriate read and publish deals that are emerging in order to offer greater value to our communities of researchers. Sage are currently offering such a deal and this is being appraised by colleagues with experience in both the library and within Research Development Services (GRE). 

A mixed landscape 

The funding of OA publication is still a very diverse landscape. Many creative and experimental operations that are aiming to find stable revenue streams that are more equitable. For instance, the Open Library of Humanities are a pure Gold OA publisher, and they have never been funded through APCs. Instead, they offer the opportunity for universities to participate in a low-cost ‘partnership scheme’. This has provided stability, and allowed great value for money to be offered. 

Gold open access publishing in other areas, however, is still a major challenge for many. The evolution of electronic books has been far more stymied than that of the electric journal or journal articles. Proprietary formats, access credit models, and digital rights management (DRM) are just some of the many differences. Scaling monograph and book publishing to Gold open access has, as such, been incredibly slow.  

The Open Book Publishers and punctum books are two open access book publishers that offer viable OA publishing a in this area, and the initiatives such as the COPIM project aim to investigate how this area may be developed to broaden and deepen the open landscape for scholarly publication. 

Stability in unstable times? 

The landscape for Gold OA is still nascent, and there are many reasonable critiques of of the emerging policies and commercial offerings from some publishers, along with the political context in which the shift towards open access publication is occurring within. 

The complexities surrounding all of this can seem alienating and even frustrating for researchers that simply want to share their work with various communities. We want support your scholarly communication activities, and as such, we are always available to ask about anything and help take some of the administrative load that the contemporary scenario may yield.