In January 2018, Spanish Government published the State Plan for Research, Development and Innovation 2017-2020 that includes important news on open access to scientific publications and research data. The State Plan is the main instrument of the State Government for developing and achieving those objectives set at the Spanish Strategy for Science and Technology and Innovation 2013-2020, and at the Europe 2020 Strategy. The funding priorities included in the National Plan are granted through com...

Guest Post by Danielle Padula, Community Development officer for Scholastica , email:  It’s no secret that the cost of corporate-run academic journals is skyrocketing. A 2007 study found the average list price of for-profit journals to be four times higher than that of not-for-profit publications. Rising journal subscription prices have increased support among the academic community for publishing scholarship open access (OA), or free to read online. But on its own OA pu...

A recent SPARC Innovator award winner , Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) was built around the principles of open research in scholarly communications. Traditionally, a research project ends up with just a few articles published in scholarly journals after many years of work. But why communicate just research articles at the end of a cycle? Research articles are just a small component of the research cycle. What about all the other project outputs - research ideas, grant proposals, methodologies...

Guest post by Leo Waaijers and Saskia de Vries (QOAM) The FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is part of the EC OpenAIRE project, giving the Pilot roots in the library world. As a funding initiative for Open Access publications, however, the Pilot has a high stake in a well functioning publishing market with authors as typical customers. This turns this Pilot into a catalyser for library-author interaction. The role of libraries in supporting researchers to make appropriate publication choices in a...

The publisher engagement plans for the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot involve signing pre-payment agreements with publishers as a means of improving the dissemination of this funding initiative towards eligible researchers and projects. Moreover, pre-payment agreements will very much simplify the invoicing workflows, making the funding of APC payments much quicker and easier for authors. Following these plans, OpenAIRE has signed a first contract for a pre-payment agreement with Ubiquity Press...

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and scientific information provider Elsevier have reached an agreement in principle  that continues to provide academics at Dutch universities with access to all Elsevier journals and allows them to publish through gold OA in a selection of Elsevier journals at no additional cost to the corresponding author.  The Dutch universities aim to make 30% of their researchers’ publications Open Access (OA) by 2018. For the first time in history t...