This article analyzes the UK's first "read and publish" journals agreement. The Springer Compact Agreement pilot ran from 2016 to 2018. The authors outline the methodology and data sources used to undertake a detailed analysis of the agreement. This includes the number of open access articles published, the number of author opt-outs and rejected articles. Institutional savings (or cost avoidance), and the financial implications resulting from the number of opt-outs and rejected articles are also discussed. The value of articles published and cost per download for non-OA content are also covered. The agreement, at the consortia level, has constrained the total cost of publication-during the three years, the HE sector has avoided paying additional costs of €20,000,800 ($22,761,688) for publishing OA by paying the single combined fee that capped publication costs at 2014 rates. All institutions taking part in the Springer Compact agreement published OA articles equivalent to or in excess of their total 2014 APC spend between 2016 and 2018. By 2018, 30 percent of institutions published OA articles to the value of or in excess of the combined fee paid to Springer. The article concludes with a number of recommendations for future agreements and considers compliance with Plan S guidelines.
Agreements with open access (OA) elements (e.g. agreements with APC discounts, offsetting agreements, read and publish agreements) have been increasing in number in the last few years. With more agreements including some form of OA, consortia and academic institutions need to monitor the number of OA publications, the costs and the value of these agreements. Publishers are therefore required to account for the articles published OA to consortia, academic institutions and research funders. One way publishers can do so is by providing regular reports with article-level metadata. This article uses the Knowledge Exchange (KE) and the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges (ESAC) initiative recommendations as a checklist to assess what article-level metadata consortia request from publishers and what metadata publishers deliver to consortia. KE countries' agreements with major publishers were analysed to assess how far consortia and publishers are from requesting and providing article-level metadata. The results from this research can be used as a benchmark to determine how major publishers were performing until early 2019 and prior to Plan S coming into effect in 2021. A recommendation is made that publishers use the article-level metadata checklist as a template to provide the metadata recommended by KE and ESAC.
The Knowledge Exchange (KE) Monitoring Open Access (OA) task and finish group has undertaken research on agreements with OA elements (e.g. agreements with APC discounts, offsetting agreements, read and publish agreements) set between consortia from KE countries and major publishers between 2016 and early 2019. It assessed agreements with OA elements to investigate what OA article-level metadata consortia request from publishers and what metadata publishers deliver to consortia. With more academic publishing agreements including OA elements, publishers must account for the articles published OA. For example, article processing charges may be paid directly by authors, institutions or research funders and the paying entity has the right to know what research it has funded. Another example includes agreements with a cap on the number of articles that can be published OA. In these cases, consortia and institutions must monitor how many articles are being published OA and they can only do so if publishers deliver OA article-level metadata reports on a regular basis. With Plan S research funders requiring a full transition to OA by 2021, the delivery of OA metadata becomes critical to monitor publishers’ compliance with Plan S requirements for transformative arrangements. In its research, the KE Monitoring OA group used recommendations issued by KE and the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges (ESAC) initiative to develop a list of OA article-level metadata to evaluate if consortia requested OA metadata and if publishers delivered it. The research findings showed that not all consortia agreements requested the OA metadata as recommended by KE and ESAC. Most importantly, none of the publishers provided all the metadata that the consortia requested. Publishers also did not deliver exactly the same OA metadata across countries and this may be due lack of consistency in their practices. The research findings can be used as a benchmark to monitor how major publishers were performing in KE countries until early 2019 and prior to Plan S comes into effect in 2021. To assist in the process OA metadata collection, the KE Monitoring OA task and finish group created a template based on the KE and ESAC recommendations that consortia can use as a guideline for what OA metadata to request from publishers and that publishers can use as a reporting tool.
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