The transformative agreements
They are new framework agreements between universities and academic publishing platforms that will change the conditions for accessing journals.
In the context of these agreements, the costs to universities relate not only to the reading of articles, but also to open access publication in certain journals that, until now, insisted upon receiving a fee for publishing in open access. Articles will now be published open access by default.
In practice, these agreements enable universities to publish in open access in certain journals.
The UOC have an APC bank with credits that can be used to publish articles in specific journals.
The objective is to establish fairer payments for universities with respect to the current system, while also promoting open science.
The UOC, as a member of the Catalan University Service Consortium (CSUC), is a signatory to the agreements with Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley.
APCs
The publishing sector contains a great number of journals that offer their articles in open access as the default option, making them available to everyone. The Institutions (for example universities, public bodies or non-profit organizations) that are responsible for many of these journals cover the publication costs.
However, this system exists in parallel with another: some publishing groups charge researchers a fee (known as an Article Processing Charge, or APC) to publish in open access.
At the same time, they also charge universities to read their content, typically though subscription packages.
This is what is known as double dipping, where universities end up paying both for publishing (APCs) and reading (subscriptions).
The objective of the new transformative agreements is for the APCs to disappear, with the knock-on effect of open access becoming the default option for academic publishing.
The negotiations
Similar to negotiations that have been conducted in other European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) have been in talks with three major publishing groups, seeking to put into practice their commitments to open science.
The ongoing negotiations with these publishers are aimed at enabling the research community to:
- continue to read the catalogue of journals to which universities subscribe at a sustainable price;
- publish their output in open access journals (those classified as Gold or Full OA) so that anyone can read, cite or share their results; and
- avoid one-off payments for publishing in open access.
Who can benefit from these agreements
Spanish universities' research community and the Spanish National Research Council. The final guidelines will be determined by the Research and Innovation Committee by December 2021; at present, any UOC researcher may be eligible to benefit.
If the request is approved, the university will obtain some of the available funding, thus freeing the researchers or research group from having to pay the bill.
In 2021 all researchers and doctoral students at the UOC who are corresponding authors of articles may opt to benefit from the credits.
Alternatives to paying for articles: open access
In light of greater awareness in the academic world as well as growing demand from research funding agencies for articles to be published in open access, transformative agreements seek to accelerate open science. The goal is to open up the knowledge created in universities and research centres to the general public, free of charge. Alternatives to paying for publishing come in a number of forms:
Catalan Research Portal - CSUC
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Take a look at the research work being done at research centres in Catalonia, with a special focus on open access publications.
In the case of the UOC, you’ll find the articles, books, theses, research groups and projects of researchers holding an ORCID identifier that have been entered in the researchers' website (GIR).
O2 Repository UOC, the institutional repository
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The UOC’s institutional repository is the portal for collecting, disseminating and preserving the open-access digital publications produced by members of the UOC as part of their research, teaching and management work. It includes articles, papers, teaching materials, final degree projects, doctoral theses, etc. for the purpose of collecting, preserving and organising the UOC’s scientific output and its institutional memory and, in particular, disseminating it, thus making it more visible and increasing its impact.
UNPAYWALL
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The Unpaywall database has a very simple structure: we have one record for every article with a Crossref DOI (that's about 95 million records all told). We harvest from lots of sources to find Open Access content, and then we match it to these DOIs using content fingerprints. So, for any given DOI, we know about any OA versions that exist anywhere (at least that's the idea).
