| Question | Springer Compact | RSC | IOP | Taylor & Francis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How sufficient is the communications between customer and publisher? Does the publisher reply to inquiries within an appropriate time? | Ok | Ok | Ok | Improvable |
| Does the publisher identify eligible affiliations manually or through parameters such as IP addresses, email suffixes, submission form, and affiliations stated in the manuscript? | Author agreement after acceptance: IPs, email domain, drop down list | submission form: email address, affiliation | submission form: email address, affiliation, affiliation on manuscript | submission form: email address, affiliation |
| Does the publisher take steps to ensure that any changes of the details of the affiliated institution (during correction of his/her proofs, or as a post-publication correction) come to the publisher’s notice. | Yes | Yes | yes | No |
| Does the publisher state clearly and prominently that there is an open access agreement in place with the author's affiliated institution (eg via an IP controlled alert) and that no extra costs are involved? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Are authors required to confirm that they want to publish open access or are they asked to fill out license agreements (opt-out/ opt-in)? | default OA, no license agreement, default CC-BY | License agreement, have to select CC-BY | default OA unless opt-out, no license agreement, default CC-BY | License agreement, have to select CC-BY |
| Does the publisher label open access articles as funded by the paying institution, for example, does the publisher provide a footnote in the open access article stating the following ‘Open access funding provided by [name of paying institution/funding organisation]’? Does this information appear on any versions (HTML, PDF)? | Yes | Yes, missing on rare occasions | Started to include funding note | No |
| Using the Crossref database, can all articles that have been published under the agreement be identified as open access articles showing a creative commons license? What is the overall coverage of license information in the metadata that has been delivered by the publisher to Crossref? | yes | yes | yes | no |
| Can the publisher provide the following dates: of acceptance/ of article verification/ of APC payment/ of online publication/ of publication? | often no acceptance date, all others yes | yes | often no acceptance date, all others yes | yes |
| Does the publisher still send invoices directly to the author? | No | No | No | No |
| Does the invoice document meet auditors' requirements? Is it possible to probably check the provided services that correspond with the invoice amount? | Yes, but the invoice has to be manually extended with the most important article meta data | Prepayment | Prepayment | Prepayment |
| Does reporting include DOIs? Do they show information about the agreement's performance (numbers of published articles in relation to article allowance)? | ok | ok | ok | No regular reports so far |
Workflow Assessment
This assessment has been carried out in 2018 at the Max Planck Digital Library for some publishers' transformative agreements.