It’s the workflows, stupid! What is required to make ‘offsetting’ work for the open access transition

A recent article by Graham Stone (Jisc) and Kai Geschuhn (MPDL) published in the British library journal UKSG Insights highlights the outcomes of two workshops organized by the Efficiencies and Standards for Article Charges initiative (ESAC) in 2016 und 2017.

The paper makes the case for stronger engagement of libraries and consortia when it comes to negotiating and drafting offsetting agreements. The workshops have shown a clear need for an improvement of the current workflows and processes between academic institutions (and libraries) and the publishers they use in terms of author identification, metadata exchange and invoicing. Publishers need to invest in their editorial systems, while institutions need to get a clearer understanding of the strategic goal of offsetting. To this purpose, strategic and practical elements, which should be included in the agreements, were introduced. The paper proposes a set of recommendations for article workflows and services between institutions and publishers, based on a draft document which was produced as part of the 2nd ESAC Offsetting Workshop in March 2017. These recommendations should be seen as a minimum set of practical and formal requirements for offsetting agreements and are necessary to make any publication-based open access business model work.

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University of Oldenburg updates its APC expenditures

The Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg has updated its APC expenditures. The lastest contribution provides additional data for the 2017 period.

The BIS (Library and Information System) is in charge of the University’s Open Access Publishing Fund, which is supported under the DFG’s Open Access Publishing Programme.

Contact person is Kim Braun.

Cost data

The new dataset covers publication fees for 23 articles. Total expenditure amounts to 30 544€ and the average fee is 1 328€.

The following table shows the payments the BIS has made to publishers since Oldenburg’s last report.

Overview

With the recent contribution included, the overall APC data for the University of Oldenburg now looks as follows:

Fees paid per publisher (in EURO)

Average costs per year (in EURO)

Average costs per publisher (in EURO)

University of Barcelona reports its 2016 APC expenditures

The Universitat de Barcelona has updated its APC expenditures, the latest contribution provides data for the 2016 period.

Contact person is Ignasi Labastida i Juan.

Cost data

The new dataset covers publication fees for 88 articles. Total expenditure amounts to 95 428€ and the average fee is 1 084€.

The following table shows the payments the University of Barcelona has made to publishers in 2016.

Overview

With the recent contribution included, the overall APC data for Barcelona now looks as follows:

Fees paid per publisher (in EURO)

Average costs per year (in EURO)

Average costs per publisher (in EURO)