It’s not uncommon for us to hear a society or association voice strong reservations about starting an open access (OA) journal based on a fundamental belief that open access is synonymous with low quality. “A fully open access journal will dilute our brand” is one refrain; “We don’t want to start a ‘journal of rejects’”… Read More

The open access market is fragmented. Different approaches at scale are being explored by stakeholders, from wholesale flipping to offsetting deals, from price caps to restrictions on using hybrid journals. Meanwhile, the real adoption of open access has been slow, reaching just 21% of output in 16 years and accounting for only 4-6% of scholarly… Read More

Swedish consortium Bibams’s recent cancellation of its contract with Elsevier is the latest in a series of high-value “publish and read” negotiations to make the news. It follows other examples such as Germany’s Projekt DEAL (also affecting Elsevier) and France’s Le Consortium Couperin (affecting Springer Nature). These multi-million dollar (or Euro or Kroner) negotiations have… Read More

Universities UK’s Monitoring the Transition to Open Access 2015 report and its recent 2017 update provide an interesting source of information about the effects of open access on a sample of UK societies. But how well does the data project onto the wider global picture? In combination with Delta Think’s extensive experience working with more… Read More

In December, Universities UK published a 2017 update to its 2015 study, Monitoring the Transition to Open Access. The results are important to all publishers as the UK public and private funders are taking a leadership position in shifting the market towards open access. What happens in the UK now may hint at what the… Read More