Jisc and five UK-based society publishers have signed pilot transitional open access (OA) agreements, now available to UK universities. The agreements are the first to result from work undertaken by Jisc Collections, negotiating with smaller publishers to offer a sustainable transition to OA.
The Microbiology Society, Portland Press, IWA Publishing, the Company of Biologists and the European Respiratory Society all now offer transitional journal agreements through the national Jisc consortium.
These ‘read and publish’ two-year pilots allow 100% of UK scholarly output to be published OA in the societies’ hybrid journals, with some including fully OA titles in the fixed-price deals.
The most extensive UK transitional agreement to date accelerates open access publishing and expands access to one of the most substantial collections of scholarly content. Jisc and Wiley, a global leader in research and education, have struck a four-year “read and publish” agreement that offers researchers at UK universities open access (OA) publishing in all Wiley journals at no cost to them.
As part of the new agreement, the proportion of OA articles published by UK researchers will increase from 27% to an estimated 85% in year one, with the potential to reach 100% by 2022. The agreement will also enable institutions and their users to access all of Wiley’s journals.