Open Access

OASPA is launching a major new project for 2025, bringing together publishing organisations with those who pay for, fund and invest in scholarly communications. We’re delighted to be partnering with Research Consulting in delivering this work over the coming months.

Global academic publisher Emerald Publishing has partnered with CAUL (Council of Australasian University Librarians) on a new agreement aimed at simplifying open access (OA) publishing in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Biochemical Society and Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries are delighted to announce an open access agreement that supports the open sharing of research and knowledge from across the molecular biosciences.

MDPI, a leading open-access publisher, has announced the renewal of its national agreement with the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (Sikt). Through MDPI’s Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP), 36 institutions will receive discounts on Article Processing Charges (APCs) across MDPI’s portfolio of more than 460 journals.

Preprints.org, a multidisciplinary preprint platform by the leading fully open-access publisher MDPI, is strengthening its partnership with PREreview, a non-profit dedicated to promoting equity and transparency in research feedback. Thanks to a new type of integration, submitting authors can now request community feedback directly from PREreview with a single click on Preprints.org. This makes it easier to gather feedback and insights and, as a result, accelerate the route to publication.

In 2021, we set a bold target: publish 50% of our primary research open access (OA) by the end of 2024. This goal was driven by the need to make research widely accessible, enabling global researchers to build on existing knowledge and tackle pressing challenges. I'm thrilled to report that we met this target, as highlighted in our recent Annual Report. But how did we do it, and what did we learn?

MDPI, the world’s largest fully open-access publisher, today announced the renewal of its national partnership agreement with Sweden’s Bibsam Consortium. Notably, 22 institutions will receive partner benefits under MDPI’s Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP), including substantial discounts on article processing charges (APCs) for affiliated authors.

Every article published in the 2025 volume of three Taylor & Francis journals will be made open access (OA), following a successful launch of the publisher’s Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot. Taylor & Francis has confirmed that enough institutions have renewed or confirmed the renewal of their subscriptions for each journal to reach the required S2O threshold.

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and the Society of China University Journals (CUJS) today announced a 3-year strategic partnership between the organizations to work together on topics and content related to open access, open science, scientific integrity and scientific evaluation.

Open Research Africa (ORA), the pioneering platform from F1000 and the Science for Africa Foundation, has announced a significant expansion of its author eligibility criteria. All articles with an author based in Africa can now be submitted, regardless of their funder. Previously, only work supported by an ORA partnering research funder could be published on the platform.

This month marks the beginning of the negotiations, led by Jisc on behalf of the higher education sector and in collaboration with key sector bodies including Universities UK (UUK), SCONUL and Research Libraries UK, to discuss how UK universities continue to access and publish open access in the journals from the five largest publishers of academic research.

De Gruyter Brill is expanding its Subscribe to Open program, DG2O, by immediately switching 37 additional journals to open access. In total, 58 journals from the De Gruyter portfolio will be published open access via DG2O in 2025, making approximately 2,300 research articles freely available to the global scholarly community.