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OR2022 Presentation Submission
17th International Open Repositories Conference, June 6th-9th in Denver, Colorado, USA
Repository Role in Transformative Agreement Implementation
Yasmeen Alsaedi, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST),
[email protected]; Nevena Tomic, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), [email protected]; Daryl Grenz, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), [email protected]; Mohamed Baessa, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), [email protected]
Abstract
As the publishing landscape continues to evolve, libraries and publishers are experimenting with a wide range of new types of open access publishing agreements, and KAUST has been able to make transformative agreements with several STEM publishers. However, the related workflows are not yet mature, and differ greatly across publishers. Ideally, all available funds (free tokens / free article processing charges) covered by transformative agreements should be used and eligible articles should have immediate open access. What happens is that sometimes the author is not aware of the deal or did not properly follow the workflow, so eligible articles are published behind the paywall, or published as open access, but paid outside the deal. When this happens, the library tries to get the article published as open access retroactively or to get a refund if possible. To help address this, the repository team made several improvements to the existing publications tracking service, developing a mechanism to track and identify eligible articles, including an email alert and a dashboard page, to help the librarians managing transformative agreements monitor articles covered by the agreements.
Keywords
open access publishing; managing open access deals; institutional publication tracking
Audience
This presentation will be of interest to repository managers, scholarly communication librarians, and library administrators who are involved in implementing transformative agreements with publishers.
Proposal
Since its adoption of an institutional open access policy in 2014, KAUST has been committed to reaching 100% open access to all affiliated publications. Through the initial approach of focusing on green open access deposits in the institutional repository, annual open access deposit rates reached over 80%, with 25-30% of deposits being final publisher versions with Creative Commons licenses. This indicates that a significant number of authors are using their own funds to pay APCs.
In order to move closer to 100% open access for new publications and to help cover the cost of open access publishing from within the existing subscription budget, the university library worked with publishers to include open access publishing within subscription agreements. A
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number of pilots were undertaken, including offset deals and voucher programs (Buck, 2018;
Vijayakumar & Tamarkin, 2016).
More recently, as part of a wider trend of more publishers becoming willing to strike transformative agreements, even with individual universities (Webster, 2021), we began working to transition from subscription agreements to transformative deals, succeeding in making agreements with 3 publishers for 2019, 7 for 2020, 11 for 2021, and 12 for 2022 (Vijayakumar & Tomic, 2021). As the number of transformative deals has grown, differing from publisher to publisher in their details, so has the complexity of the required workflows.
While a number of external services and tools are available or in development to help manage the implementation of these agreements, they do not currently integrate with all of the
different publishers’ workflows, and are not necessarily a good fit for our immediate local needs. So, rather than subscribing to a new service or adopting a new system, the repository team enhanced the existing publications tracking service, established to support the KAUST open access policy (Alsaedi et al., 2021), with additional features. These include more careful tracking of corresponding author information, email notifications when a new article is published that should be covered by an agreement, and a dashboard for overall monitoring.
This presentation will first review the features of different publisher agreements that need to be managed, the resulting administrative burden on libraries, the maturity of available tools, and the gaps and limitations in existing tools and workflows in dealing with the needed
information. Secondly, we will describe how existing local tools and information sources were reused and adapted to address these gaps in light of our local institutional requirements, and demonstrate how these tools provide an improved way to track, manage, and report. To conclude we will present how insights derived from the assessment of this work may feed into future negotiations with publishers and future agreements, as well as into discussions with stakeholders within our university.
References
Alsaedi, Y., Grenz, D., & Baessa, M. (2021). Leveraging Open Services to Enhance Institutional Research Tracking Workflows. Open Repositories 2021.
Buck, S. (2018). Role of library’s subscription licenses in promoting open access to scientific research. Second KAUST Library Saudi Seminar. http://hdl.handle.net/10754/627730 Vijayakumar, J. K., & Tamarkin, M. (2016). Open Access, Library Subscriptions, and Article
Processing Charges. 8th International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries QQML 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10754/617078
Vijayakumar, J. K., & Tomic, N. (2021). Managing institutional open access publishing deals:
experiences of KAUST, Saudi Arabia. Electronic Resources and Libraries ER&L 2021.
Webster, K. (2021). Open Access Global Trends and CMU Experiences. KAUST University Library Outreach Lecture 2021. https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/13650683