Negotiation principles

Building on the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and on the progress that has been achieved so far, we are pursuing the large-scale implementation of free online access to, and largely unrestricted use and re-use of scholarly research articles.

We recognize and endorse various ways of implementing open access (OA), including the development of new OA publishing platforms, archives and repositories. In scholarly journal publishing, OA has gained a substantial and increasing volume. Most journals, however, are still based on the subscription business model with its inherent deficiencies in terms of access, cost-efficiency, transparency, and restrictions of use.

To gain the full benefits of OA and enable a smooth, swift and scholarly oriented transition, the existing corpus of scholarly journals should be converted from subscription to open access. Recent developments and studies indicate that this transition process can be realized within the framework of currently available resources.

With this statement, we express our interest in establishing an international initiative for the OA transformation of scholarly journals, and we agree upon the following key aspects:

• We aim to transform a majority of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to OA publishing in accordance with community-specific publication preferences. At the same time, we continue to support new and improved forms of OA publishing.
• We will pursue this transformation process by converting resources currently spent on journal subscriptions into funds to support sustainable OA business models. Accordingly, we intend to re-organize the underlying cash flows, to establish transparency with regard to costs and potential savings, and to adopt mechanisms to avoid undue publication barriers.
• We invite all parties involved in scholarly publishing, in particular universities, research institutions, funders, libraries, and publishers to collaborate on a swift and efficient transition for the benefit of scholarship and society at large.

Specific steps and milestones for the transformation process shall be outlined in a roadmap to be further developed in the course of this initiative. We see the initiative as one element of a more profound evolution of the academic publishing system that will lead to major improvements in scholarly communication and research evaluation.

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In the Call to Action, seven strategic priorities for journal negotiations have been formulated:

1. We will prioritize making immediate open access publishing available to UC authors as part of our negotiated agreements.
2. We will prioritize agreements that lower the cost of research access and dissemination, with sustainable, cost-based fees for OA publication. Payments for OA publication should reduce the cost of subscriptions at UC and elsewhere.
3. We will prioritize agreements with publishers who are transparent about the amount of APC-funded content within their portfolios, and who share that information with customers as well as the public.
4. We will prioritize agreements that enable UC to achieve expenditure reductions in our licenses when necessary, without financial penalty.
5. We will prioritize agreements that make any remaining subscription content available under terms that fully reflect academic values and norms, including the broadest possible use rights.
6. We will prioritize agreements that allow UC to share information about the open access provisions with all interested stakeholders, and we will not agree to non-disclosure requirements in our licenses.
7. We will prioritize working proactively with publishers who help us achieve a full transition to open access in accordance with the principles and pathways articulated by our faculty and our libraries.

• Read the full Call to Action
• The Call to Action appeared alongside discussion of another recently-released University of California document, the Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication.
• Guidelines for Evaluating Transformative Open Access Agreements

1. We are in broad support of Plan S and its goals to ensure immediate and complete open access to journal articles resulting from publicly funded research to the world. We applaud the effort of Plan S to provide strong incentives to make research open access. We support an international effort to achieve this goal worldwide as soon as possible.

2. We fully recognize that the need for forceful and accountable policies by public funders in research, education, and libraries, to facilitate open access against various entrenched interests or the inertia of the status quo. We urge all in research, education, publishing, platforms, repositories, and libraries to engage diligently in transformative efforts abreast with time to meet the challenges.

3. We support the Final Conference Statement of the 14th Berlin Conference on Open Access with its commitments. We urge all the publishers to work with the global research community to effect complete and immediate open access according to the Statement.

4. We support the principles and roadmaps of OA2020 Initiative which aims to transform a majority of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to OA publishing, while continues to support new forms of OA publishing. We believe the transition process can be realized within the framework of currently available resources. We see no legitimate reasons for, and will object to, any attempts to increase spending from the original subscribing institutions in the transformation.

5. We support that authors retain copyrights of their publications in open access publishing through journals or open access platforms.

6. We support that open access publications are made under open licenses. We support the use of the CC-BY license as the preferred one but recommend that other CC licenses also be allowed as compliant to Plan S.

7. We recognize the strong need for compliant requirements, agreed by the research communities, for open access journals and platforms. We agree that infrastructural instruments like DOAJ and OpenDOAR can be utilized to help identifying and signaling compliance, but we urge that cOAlition S and other funders recognize and support other appropriate mechanisms for the purpose and require any such instruments are put under international oversight by the global research community to ensure their no-for-profit nature, inclusiveness, objectiveness, integrity, and efficiency.

8. We commend the recognition by Plan S that there exist different models of financing and paying for Open Access publication. We support an inclusive range of immediate open access publishing approaches. We support the transparency and monitoring of open access publication costs and fees.

9. We urge that cOAlition S and other funders, through Plan S or other means, provide financial support for no-fee OA journals. The wide range of support approaches tono-fee OA journals should be encouraged to enhance the diversity of open access publishing and competitiveness of publishing market, and to avoid the perverse effect of giving no-fee journals an incentive to start charging fees. While the support can start with general term statements, measures can be timely designed and tested to encourage quality, integrity, transparency and openness, and increasing host investment and other diverse and appropriate income.

10. We support that where article processing charges (APCs) apply, efforts are made to establish a fair and reasonable APC level, including equitable waiver policies, that reflects the costs involved in the quality assurance, editing, and publishing process and how that adds value to the publication. We hold it very important that any such effort should take into consideration of the diversity in the world to ensure applicability and affordability of any such measures across countries and disciplines.

11. We commend the support and requirements of Plan S for financing APCs for open access publication in subscription journals (“hybrid Open Access”) only under transformative agreements. These agreements should be temporary and transitional, with a shift to full open access within a very few years.

12. We understand the purposes and the benefits of using ORCIDs in journal publications. Considering different paces of adopting ORCID in different regions and disciplines, we recommend that it is implemented as a preferred condition, at least in the short beginning years. We recommend the same treatment for using DOI.

13. We support the Plan S recommendation that “all publications and also other research outputs deposited in open repositories.” We recommend that Plan S make full acknowledge and use of the full range of capabilities of open repositories to support open access, long-term preservation, research management, and re-use.

14. We encourage that Plan S takes the transformative green OA mechanism as one of venues to implement open access, as long as the embargo period of compliant green OA repositories should be reduced to zero in a short time.

15. We understand the purposes and the benefits of automatic ingest of publications, JATS XML format, Open API to allow others (including machines) to access, QA process to integrate full text with core abstract and indexing services. We support the efforts to work toward adapting to these or equivalent techniques for more efficient processing and better use of open access content. We call on publishers and libraries to strive for this. However, at the beginning, we recommend that these are implemented as preferred measures. Other means of ingest, different machine-readable publication formats, alternative Open APIs or even temporarily lacking of Open APIs, and other means of QA should be allowed as compliant. At the same time common best practice guidelines and infrastructural support should be developed with international consultation to make the best and easy use of these or other equivalent methods or techniques.

16. We recommend that Plan S add as a requirement that, either by national laws or regulations, or by grant contract requirements, that funded authors retain sufficient and non-exclusive rights to deposit their publications into open repositories.

17. We commend and support the intention of cOAlition S and other public funders to support mechanisms for establishing Open Access journals, platforms, and infrastructures where necessary in order to provide routes to open access publication in all disciplines. We encourage efforts by funders to increase the innovation and competitiveness of open access publishing and open access infrastructural instruments.

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1. Agreements must reduce costs
Academic publishing is a shared endeavour between publishers, research funders, academic staff, and institutions. The UK punches above its weight both in terms of research quality and the benefits that publishers realise through peer review and editorial services and this must be reflected in publisher proposals.

A global transition to OA requires funders, publishers, and institutions to work in unison to implement agreements that offer the maximum benefit with the minimum burden on public finances, researchers and institutions.

The cost of agreements must reflect the current and future financial circumstances of institutions. Universities are already taking measures to reduce their costs and further increase efficiency through actions including recruitment freezes and tighter spending controls. University and research libraries ask their suppliers to similarly strive for efficiency to provide affordable options that reflect the financial context universities now operate under.

Many, if not all, institutions need to reprioritise investment and are unable to commit to agreements that lock in funds through TAs unless they provide full and immediate access to research and provide budgetary stability.

The agreement must:

• Provide unlimited OA publishing to all research and review articles for all eligible authors with no caps on article numbers for an affordable and sustainable fee. For clarification, the total fee charged for both access to paywalled content and OA publishing must result in a reduction on existing subscription expenditure
• Offer fair, affordable, and sustainable fees for access and publishing services
• Commit to constraining costs for all elements of the agreement, including APCs
  • Fees should not reflect payments made for publishing services “in the wild” by individual researchers
  • The publisher should not charge the author or their institution any further publishing fees, including page charges
• Recognise that institutions are diverse with differing research profiles. Publishing output can vary dramatically each year
• Ensure that charges for paywalled content and collections reflect the volume of content made OA – reconciliation of the volume of content made OA should be undertaken each year and reflected in the price paid by all customers
• Ensure that OA titles remain OA. Public funds and collective efforts have assisted the transformation of titles to OA. OA titles should not revert to paywall access under subscription models

Agreements that include APCs paid by individual researchers or arrangements with illusory or complicated discount mechanisms, such as the application of discount codes, add costs and inefficiencies to the system and must be avoided. Uncapped agreements that convert all output to OA are the most efficient and result in greater author satisfaction.

2. Agreements must be transitional and temporary
Publisher proposals must:

• Demonstrate a commitment to an OA transition through the conversion of subscription expenditure to support immediate OA publication. Funders’ support for OA is both limited and temporary and publisher agreements must maximise existing subscription expenditure and not require additional commitment such as a requirement to pay to access additional titles
• Provide a rapid increase in UK authored articles published OA – 100% of UK output as quickly as possible
• Demonstrate their commitment to a full and global transition to OA. This includes changing their underlying financial accounting and pursuing agreements that convert their portfolio to other institutions, consortia or countries, particularly those with high levels of research output. As stated in ESAC’s guidelines for transformative agreements, “while individual transformative agreements have the potential to convert 100% of a given institution or consortium’s output to OA publishing, it is the sum of many agreements together that will induce the transition at scale.”
• Show how the agreement breaks the link from legacy pricing models to support the implementation of clear, fair and transparent pricing models more suited to an OA environment
• Provide permanent full-text access to all content. This is to secure future access and remove the need for publishers and institutions to maintain entitlement records relating to paywalled content

3. Agreements must permit compliance with funder mandates
The agreement must enable institutions and their authors to comply with funder mandates by:

• Supporting OA via the green route by allowing the “Version of Record” first made publicly available (such as on the publisher’s website) or the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to be openly available immediately in repositories in full alignment with funder policies, including the application of the required licence
  • If an article is not eligible under an agreement, authors must be able to make their AAM available with no embargo and under a licence that allows reuse by all, in perpetuity under CC-BY licensing terms
• Allowing the author or the author’s institution to retain their copyright and the rights necessary to make a version of the article immediately available under a compliant open licence
  • This includes not inhibiting the use of the Rights Retention Strategy either by rejecting articles, rerouting articles to other journals or by presenting an author, (including co-authors) with terms that prevent them from making their AAM immediately OA in compliance with their funder policies
• Implementing workflow processes that assign CC-BY as the first and default option and make clear to the author that the application of the licensing terms is a requirement of their funder
• Joining Jisc’s Publications Router to provide the systematic transfer of metadata and deposit of full-text articles into repositories
• Depositing articles into PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the first publication of the version of record, in accordance with funder policies

4. Agreements must be transparent
It is in the public interest, not only that publicly funded research has the widest possible reach, but that the costs, progress, and details of the transition to OA are openly available.

This allows the sector to benchmark, improve processes, and better understand where investment or divestment is required. The goal is the implementation of fair, transparent, affordable and sustainable pricing for publishing services.

It will be a requirement of an agreement that the publisher enters into open and transparent conversations with the sector and Jisc on the transition of their portfolio, business models and underlying financial accounting. This will be monitored by the transitional agreements oversight group. Publishers should also adhere to at least one of the cOAlition S Price and Service Transparency Frameworks.

In advance of consultations with institutions, publisher proposals must provide article level metadata and provide the following as a minimum:

• The number of articles published by each UK institution in all the publisher’s journals including, on an article basis, the DOI of the article, details of article processing charges and corresponding author information
• All available information that identifies whether the research was funded by UK research funders and whether the applicable article processing charge was supported by UK research funder

On agreement completion details of the costs, pricing models and the agreement terms (contract) will be made publicly available on the Jisc website. The agreement will be logged in the ESAC registry.

Throughout the agreement, the publisher will be contractually obligated to provide the following data split by institution:

• Total spend within and outside the agreement
• The total number of OA articles published in each journal
• The number and details of all OA articles published in fully OA and subscriptions journals included and outside the agreement by year
• UK articles as a proportion of the global output
• Article level data for all articles published by UK corresponding authors including information on funder and licence type
• Details of which titles have “flipped to OA” that were previously paid for through subscriptions
• In addition, and to support discussions with the Transitional Agreements Oversight Group, we seek the following:
  • Number of titles expected to flip in the current calendar year
  • Predicted growth in each journal portfolio, and
  • Publishers’ journal portfolio predictions

5. OA content must be discoverable, and agreements must support improvements in service and workflow for authors and administrators
An effective transition to OA is reliant on developments in technical infrastructure and the adoption of national and international standards which can deliver efficiencies for publishers, authors and institutions, and enhanced discovery and re-use.

The agreement must:

• Evidence a commitment to improving the processes and workflows associated with managing OA to deliver greater efficiencies and discovery of OA material
• Include the service and performance levels stipulated in the Jisc model licence, which reflect several of the ESAC recommendations and provide a compensation mechanism should the agreed levels not be me

The publisher shall be responsible for the identification of eligible authors and eligible articles from a given individual and institution as part of the submission and publication process.

The publisher shall build ORCID, Ringgold or other recognised identifiers into submission, production, and peer review workflows and expose author ORCIDs in published articles and AAMs via AI services, Crossref and other discovery services.

The publisher shall identify eligible authors through a combination of the following parameters:

• Authors stating their affiliation(s) at article submission, including the use of RORs
• IP ranges
• Email domain(s)

The publisher undertakes to:

• Register the article’s DOI with Crossref upon acceptance, and inform all co-authors
• Identify funders of institutional research by populating funding metadata, including funding body and grant number, in Funding Data (on Crossref) and on the publisher’s site so institutions can report to funders and show compliance levels
• Include clear licensing terms at article level to ensure institutional readers/users understand what they may do with a given article and that repository staff and related services can act upon the correct article licensing terms. Article level information is required for each version of the article and ideally by populating the LicenseRef metadata on Crossref as well as in a human-readable form

Read the full JISC requirements

A “read & publish” approach is favoured, aimed at compensating publishing houses for the articles published from Swiss universities plus a fee for access to the complete content in lieu of the classic subscriptions for accessing journals. The main idea is to transform publishing and establish a new business and price model geared towards the publications. The negotiation goals are based on the principles of LIBER:

1. Licences and open access are closely linked: No institution should pay licence fees for access to the contents and additional article processing charges (APCs; “double-dipping”). The payment of APCs should lead to a proportional reduction of the licence fees. This is to be regulated in the new licence contracts.
2. No open access, no price increase: Overall, the universities invest a lot of money in journal subscriptions, which are subject to annual price increases. On the academic publication market, however, the demand for open access publication models is on the increase. Providers must meet these needs. Therefore, price increases are no longer acceptable. Transparency of the licence contracts:
3. The licence contracts are paid from public funds. Accordingly, their contents should also be open access. Socially, confidentiality clauses are no longer accepted.
4. Guaranteeing long-term access to content that is already licensed: In order to prevent libraries from spending more money on licences and boost open access, some libraries have relinquished long-term access to licensed content in the past. However, this access is crucial in a rapidly developing market and must be guaranteed.
5. Usage data should contain open access: Although APC payments are becoming increasingly important, the quality of the reports on publications and paid services is unsatisfactory. Alongside usage figures with accesses and downloads, libraries should also be able to access automated reports on open access publications at any time.
6. Cost neutrality: Open access should not lead to higher costs in the medium and long term, even though additional costs may be incurred in the conversion phase.
7. Minimising administrative burden: While switching to a new model, the necessary administrative burden for researchers and libraries should be kept to a minimum.

Read the full fact sheet on the negotiating strategy of swissuniversities

Preamble

The essence of transitional Open Access (OA) agreements is to contain journal subscription fees and article processing charges (APC) within a single contractual framework. For the benefit of the research community, as well as for the efficient use of public funds, these agreements facilitate a swift and full transition to Open Access in a sustainable, cost-neutral way.

Principles for transitional Open Access agreements

1. Transition to Open Access should constrain costs of the current subscription model. These agreements must ultimately lead to a purely publication-based OA model.
2. Corresponding authors affiliated at consortium member institutions must be able to publish Open Access articles without further delay and without any additional costs.
3. Articles must be published under CC-BY licence.
4. Workflows of transitional agreements should follow the Recommendations for article workflows and services for offsetting/open access transformation agreements by Efficiency and Standards in Article Charges (ESAC) initiative, with special respect to the registration article-level metadata in Crossref and the standardised identification of authors.
5. Agreements must be transparent and publicly available, following the Hungarian legislation.
6. Perpetual access to content published in subscription journals must be granted to the consortium member institutions.

Declaration

The Programme Board mandates EISZ to sign national-level agreements for journal collections only in case the above principles are met and become apparent in the licences.

The Programme Board strongly supports the collaboration with the domestic and international communities to enable a rapid and efficient transition to Open Access.

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