Education International just released a new report as part of their global response to the growing commercialisation and privatisation of education, Democratising Knowledge: a report on the scholarly publisher, Elsevier, by Dr. Jonathan Tennant. The report aims to provide the foundations for a critical study into Elsevier’s business model and practices. Go to the report
EUA asks European Commission to investigate lack of competition in the scholarly publishing business sector
The EUA Council adopted a statement on 26 October 2018 expressing its concern about the lack of transparency and competition in the scholarly publishing business sector in Europe. The statement, addressed to the European Commission, asks for an investigation to clarify if competition rules guarantee fair competition market conditions. Read full press release
Researchers submit a formal complaint regarding RELX and the wider scholarly publishing market to the EU competition authority
Researchers Prof. Björn Brembs and Prof. Johnathan Tennant made a formal complaint regarding RELX (Elsevier) and the wider scholarly publishing market to the EU competition authority. See the document at Zenodo
Happy Open Access Week! Let’s develop a culture of sharing! ESAC Initiative becomes an information-sharing hub for OA negotiators
As anticipated at the ICOLC meeting in London and the OA2020 Transformation Lab in Prague, we announce the re-launch of the ESAC Initiative and website (https://esac-initiative.org/) with a number of extremely valuable crowd-sourced tools and resources related to transitional license models (ie Offsetting, Read & Publish, etc.). With more and more library consortia and individual […]
2018’s Workshop report published
This year, the ESAC initiative hosted a workshop on APC pricing mechanisms to discuss how institutions can develop their own goals in this respect, in order to progress towards a sustainable and transparent APC market. The workshop report outlines the participant’s common understanding of APC pricing as well as strategies to mitigate the potential risks […]
The weakest link – workflows in open access agreements: the experience of the Vienna University Library and recommendations for future negotiations
In recent years open access (OA) publishing agreements have left a lasting impact on several aspects of the research life cycle, and on the manner in which institutions work with publishers and researchers to support the transition to OA. Apart from the immediate financial implications, one significant challenge libraries are facing is the sub-optimal level […]
It’s the workflows, stupid! What is required to make ‘offsetting’ work for the open access transition
A recent article by Graham Stone (Jisc) and Kai Geschuhn (MPDL) published in the British library journal UKSG Insights highlights the outcomes of two workshops organized by the Efficiencies and Standards for Article Charges initiative (ESAC) in 2016 und 2017. The paper makes the case for stronger engagement of libraries and consortia when it comes […]
Dutch vsnu published open access agreement details
Due to a public access request, vsnu publishes the major contract points including cost details for 8 out of 10 of their open access agreements: http://www.vsnu.nl/en_GB/public-access-request
ESAC initiative releases a “Joint Understanding of Offsetting”
As a result of our workshop in March, ESAC today releases a reference document reflecting a “Joint Understanding of Offsetting” of the participants.
Open access offsetting under construction
Since publishers have introduced the hybrid open access option, there is a constant debate on the “double dipping” issue, meaning publishers charging fees for opening up individual articles despite selling the respective journal as part of a subscription bundle. The new offset deals claim to follow a different approach. Here, open access publishing costs were […]
