Coordinated Projects

Driven by the openCost project, the EZB is being extended to provide researchers and authors with information on the costs of OA publishing, as well as on funding conditions and subsidies available at their own institution. The new features allow authors to use the EZB to navigate through the details of funding conditions and to estimate publication costs. [...]

As part of our work with cOAlition S, Cottage Labs has been involved in tracking the details of Transformative Agreements, and especially the changing lists of institutions and journals to which they apply. We use this information to give authors up-to-date information about the agreements that cover their work, to ensure compliant Open Access publishing.Transformative Agreements are not a well-defined thing; in our work we have encountered many types of agreements with various strange internal structures and eligibility criteria. [...]

The ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry lists around 540 transformative deals for 2024, concluded with about 60 publishers and covering more than 60 countries. While these agreements follow the same underlying principle of combining open access publishing and reading with the ultimate goal of open access transformation, they tend to differ significantly in detail. [...]

The University of Groningen (UG) Library conducted a financial investigation into its OA costs outside of the institutional R&P deals in 2022. This investigation showed that at least 1M€ per year is spent on Article Processing Charges outside of the deals. [...]

For about ten years, the National Library of Finland and the FinELib consortium office (part of the National Library) have been monitoring Finland’s institutional expenditure to guide FinELib’s negotiations with publishers and to enable the administration of our existing agreements. Most major Finnish HEI’s now share their APC cost data with OpenAPC, while all Finnish HEI’s provide data for our national cost survey, conducted every second year since 2022 and designed to provide an up-to-date picture of the total costs of OA and publication to Finnish institutions. [...]

Effective strategic decision-making in Open Science (OS) relies on a nuanced understanding of how journal business models influence market dynamics and research activities. This talk will explore how integrating detailed Open Cost Data with the advanced tools, data and evaluation frameworks from OpenAIRE [1] and the PathOS project [2] can support the assessment and optimization of OS practices.The OpenAIRE Graph [3], a comprehensive scientific knowledge database, provides essential insights into the OS landscape with the OpenAIRE monitoring services [4, 5] offering data-driven dashboards and tools for evaluating OS metrics and trends [...]

Initiatives such as openCost play an important role in improving transparency and understanding around open access publication costs. There are other hidden costs and unintended consequences that open access is often criticised for: the growth of unsustainable business models, the rise of questionable journals that exploit the APC, and a less equitable publishing landscape.However, it's a myth that open access means APCs, and two-thirds of open access journals listed in DOAJ do not charge publication fees [...]

Through the “Open Access Publication Funding” programme [1], the German Research Foundation (DFG) is providing scientific institutions with financial support for open access publication fees. One of the programme’s key objectives is to enable a system of transparent monitoring of publication fees at scientific institutions, with the intent to leverage to the national and international level. [...]

The OpenAPC initiative collects and disseminates datasets on fees paid for open access publishing under an open database license. OpenAPC is operated by Bielefeld University Library. [...]

Since 2017, The National Library of Sweden is commissioned by the government to monitor the total expenditures for scholarly publishing at higher education institutions (HEI). The result is presented in a yearly reportto the government. [...]