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Unlocking the Value of Clinical Trial Data for Improved Decision-making

ConTech Pharma 2023 (June 8th) features Eric Little, PhD, Industry Innovation Principal Director – Head of Strategy & Analytics at Accenture Life Sciences explaining how this is done.

Clinical trials data can be difficult to capture and effectively utilize for future decision-making activities, including finding the right patients, selecting appropriate sites, establishing cohorts, understanding valuable patterns and trends in the data (non-compliance, drop-out rates), and comparing data across different trials. This talk will show how Accenture is using semantics to integrate clinical data around standards in order to provide advanced types of search and analytics of clinical trials data. We call this engine Intelligence Everywhere. Utilizing advanced AI-based connectors, we will show how to find complex salient patterns across heterogeneous data sources using only metadata captured in various ontology models. Data can be queried from transactional as well as historical sources, across different formats (FHIR, SDTM, etc.) and patterns that are returned can be sent to powerful analytics engines to produce complex answers to clients’ most challenging questions. The engine comes pre-loaded with certain standard models and algorithms, all of which can be quickly and easily extended for a given client’s specific needs and use cases. We will briefly discuss how newly evolving generative-AI capabilities can be integrated as well, in order to provide a highly interactive system that can also manage data access, security, and limit current challenges around explainability of automated analysis.

This is just one of the latest sessions to confirm at ConTech Pharma 2023 taking place on 8th June.  Come and hear how the world’s best minds in data science, digital healthcare and precision drug development are thinking about these types of challenges and taking effective action.

ConTech Pharma 2023 will be a 1-day hybrid event, taking place both online and at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel, London Heathrow.  It will showcase the very latest thinking and help organisations to navigate this rapidly changing space. Our event includes a packed programme of expert speakers, plenty of networking and a cocktail reception for the in-person version.

Sign up today – go to https://www.contech.live/contech-pharma-2023 and learn more and book to get valuable early bird registration discounts. These discounts must end 4th May

With thanks to Elsevier – Main conference partner and Morressier, Gold sponsor

There are so many ways to become part of the ConTech community. Visit our website tofind out more about all of our events https://www.contechlive.com/

ResearchGate and Royal Society of Chemistry announce partnership

ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, a learned society founded 180 years ago – and whose mission includes providing opportunities and tools for the chemical science community to network, create and exchange knowledge, adapt and thrive – have today announced a partnership that will see all journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s open access portfolio benefit from an enhanced presence on ResearchGate through its new Journal Home offering.

As part of the Journal Home offering, all version-of-record content from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s eight newly launched open access journals will be syndicated directly to ResearchGate, dedicated journal profiles will be created and made accessible on the network, and each journal will be prominently represented on all of its associated article pages on ResearchGate. This enhanced presence will help to grow the readership of these journals – as measured via COUNTER-compliant reporting – as well as increase journal visibility and engagement among the highly relevant researcher audience that is active on ResearchGate.

Last year, the Royal Society of Chemistry announced its intention to transition to a wholly open access publisher within the next five years, and, given researchers specializing in chemistry represent one of the largest audiences on ResearchGate, both parties see a clear opportunity to accelerate growth in readership and submissions for the new open access journals included in the partnership.

Authors of the articles included in the partnership will see their content automatically added to their publication pages on ResearchGate, giving them access to statistics showing the impact of their work, and enabling them to connect with their readers. Additionally, researchers will be able to more easily learn about potential publishing opportunities across the Royal Society of Chemistry’s growing portfolio.

“We’re excited to be able to connect the 1.5 million chemists on ResearchGate with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s newly launched open access journals, and we look forward to helping to accelerate growth in readership and submissions for these exciting new publishing venues,” said Sören Hofmayer, Chief Strategy Officer at ResearchGate.

Sara Bosshart, Head of Open Access at the Royal Society of Chemistry, said: “One of the key goals in our transition to 100% OA is to ensure maximum access to our content – that everyone, everywhere has the same ability to read all of the key research we publish.

“We know that ResearchGate is one of the most used platforms within academia and so we hope that by making the OA content in our new OA journals available directly on ResearchGate that this will facilitate ease of access to this content across the globe.

“We look forward to seeing the usage data from ResearchGate and anticipate that we will reach a broader network of researchers – not only chemists – through this partnership.”

Cambridge open access fees waived for over 100 countries

Academics from 107 low- and middle-income countries will be able to publish their research open access in Cambridge journals at no cost to them.

The Cambridge Open Equity Initiative allows scholars to reach the widest possible audience by making open access a free option for them.

The publisher is seeking support for the initiative from institutional partners, such as major university libraries, to make it sustainable. Institutional customers will join Cambridge University Press in making voluntary contributions to the initiative to support authors in lower income countries.

The move will help overcome financial barriers to publishing open access research in countries where research funding is scarce.

Critically, this fund will be a publisher-library collaboration, recognising the role multiple stakeholders are playing in the open access transformation.

From 1 July 2023, authors from 5,000 institutions in 107 countries will not need to apply for funding to publish under the Cambridge Open Equity Initiative, which covers 400 Cambridge journals.

Professor Dixon Chibanda of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, joint Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health, and founder of Friendship Bench, Zimbabwe, said: “This will enable the rich practical lessons from the Global South to be shared with the global scientific community. I hope other major publishers will follow.”

Automatic recognition

Cambridge University Press will automatically recognise eligibility of corresponding authors when a paper is accepted. Cambridge will also remove fees for independent scholars from those low- and middle-income countries, using a simple form.

Institutional customers will join Cambridge University Press in investing in the initiative to support peers in lower income countries.

Under the current system, without fee waivers, Article Processing Charges for gold open access publications are typically around £2,000 or $3,000, varying by journal. Authors at institutions with ‘transformative agreements’ – primarily in high income countries – can avoid such charges.

Earlier this year, Cambridge announced that more than half of its research papers are now published open access, as the publisher moves to make the vast majority freely available to all by 2025. The Cambridge Open Equity Initiative aims to accelerate this transition, particularly for scholars outside of high income countries.

Collaborative approach

Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, said: “We want to publish the best research, wherever it comes from. As open access shifts costs from readers to authors, we should guard against unintended consequences – especially in an unequal global higher education system.

“We have chosen to take this collaborative approach to create the fund rather than adding more on to article processing charges and transformative agreement prices, as we believe it gives greatest transparency.

“We cannot do this alone. We are grateful to our partners, including librarians and university leaders, for recognising the opportunity to accelerate open research worldwide. We will continue to push for a more open global research system.”

Curtis Brundy, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Communications and Collections at Iowa State University, said: “We have to maintain our focus on equity as we transition to open access. The Cambridge Open Equity Initiative helps the community to overcome both financial and administrative barriers, ensuring that scholars have the opportunity to publish regardless of the availability of funding.”  

University of California Agreement with Wiley Expands to all 10 UC campuses

The University of California, which generates nearly 10 percent of U.S. research output, and Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers, announced today an expansion of their open access agreement. Researchers at all 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will now receive funding support to publish open access, making significantly more UC research freely available to people around the world.

“The free and open dissemination of knowledge is core to our mission as a public university,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley, and co-chair of UC’s publisher negotiation team. “By making UC’s groundbreaking research widely available, we enable researchers across the globe to build on our discoveries and accelerate progress in fields from medicine to climate science to the social sciences — deepening our ability to make connections and solve problems.”

Building on success

Under the 2023 agreement, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the open access fee, or article processing charge (APC), for all UC faculty, students, staff and clinicians who publish in any of Wiley’s more than 1,600 journals. The libraries will pay the entire APC for authors who wish to make their work freely available but do not have research funds available. UC authors also receive a 15 percent discount on the APC.

This shared funding model proved successful in the first year of the pilot between UC and Wiley. On the five campuses that participated in 2022 — Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz — the number of open access articles published in Wiley journals increased nearly three-fold compared with previous years.

Bringing in Berkeley (including LBNL), Davis, San Diego, UCLA and UCSF will quadruple the amount of UC research covered under the agreement — putting UC on track for an even greater number of open access articles in 2023. Ten percent of all UC research is published in Wiley journals.

“We’re extremely excited to expand our partnership with UC to deliver more open access research, enhancing discovery across a wide variety of subject areas and contributing to real-world solutions,” said Kathryn Sharples, vice president, open research at Wiley. “Through partnerships like these, we are committed to making more peer-reviewed science more widely available, supporting academics who move our world forward every day.”

By piloting its shared funding model in partnership with publishers of all sizes, including Wiley, UC is demonstrating a sustainable approach to open access for research-focused institutions.

Breaking new ground

The 2023 agreement also includes unprecedented measures to protect author rights, another priority of the UC faculty, along with free and open public access to research. UC partnered with Wiley to incorporate new terms that address variations in author rights under different types of Creative Commons licenses, which are common across the publishing industry. The UC libraries are committed to ensuring that UC authors do not lose rights depending on what type of Creative Commons license they select when publishing their article.

“Ensuring that authors retain copyright is critical,” said John Hildebrand, Distinguished Professor at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Chair of the UC faculty Academic Senate’s University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC). “We appreciate Wiley’s willingness to engage with UC on this issue and look forward to continuing to make progress on protecting author rights, just as we have with advancing free and open access to research.”

STM Solutions releases MVP of new paper mill detection tool

Today, STM Solutions, the operational arm of STM, announced the release of the MVP (minimal viable product) of a paper mill detection tool as part of the STM Integrity Hub. It is a stand-alone web application where submitted journal manuscripts can be uploaded and checked for a variety of signals indicative of paper mills. 

At a high level, this is how the tool works: a publisher uploads a manuscript to the tool, which then scans it for pre-identified indications of potential fraud. If any potential issues with the paper are noted, the system generates a message alerting the research integrity managers and editors, allowing them to investigate and take action if needed.

“The mission of the STM Integrity Hub is to offer a holistic approach to detect manuscripts that offend research integrity through a combination of shared data and experiences, and by harnessing technological innovation,” said STM CEO Caroline Sutton. 

“Through shared intelligence and data, collaboration with third parties and a robust platform, we have made an important step with this MVP toward effectively and efficiently responding to the increasing and alarming volume of materials entering scholarly communications that violate accepted research integrity. We look forward to increasing and improving the signals that are used in the paper mill detection tool.” 

The tool is fully consistent with applicable laws and industry best practices, and it fully respects the laws and ethics of submission and data privacy. In its current form, the paper mill detection tool contains internally developed tools as well as external tools and databases. 

Safeguarding research integrity can only be done through collaboration with all stakeholders in the scholarly ecosystem. STM Solutions worked with several research integrity specialists and organizations for this release, including PubPeer, Clear Skies, Elisabeth Bik and Guillaume Cabanac (pro bono). The STM Integrity Hub hopes to deepen and extend its collaboration with research integrity specialists and organizations going forward.

The MVP is currently available to participating publishers in the STM Integrity Hub. In the future, the tool will be offered to a wider range of publishers and integrated with submissions systems and other workflow systems.

Association for Computing Machinery agreement “a significant step forward for open access in the UK”

New deal enables authors to publish research open access without article processing charges (APCs) and gives institutions unlimited access to the ACM Digital Library

On behalf of the UK’s higher education and research sector, Jisc has signed an open publish and read deal with ACM, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

Working closely with Jisc throughout the negotiations, ACM was transparent about its costs, which allowed the Jisc team to clearly demonstrate the good value of the deal to its members.

The agreement, which runs for three years until 2025, enables all affiliated authors to publish their research on a completely open access basis in the ACM Digital Library by selecting a creative commons attribution licence (CC BY) for article sharing and reuse.

This allows anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, adapt and make commercial use of the work as long as they attribute it as the author wishes.

Under the deal, the ACM will deposit copies of all published articles into the author’s university open repository. This means authors can share, re-use and re-distribute research after publication without extra costs.

The institutions that use the ACM agreement will also retain access to the ACM Digital Library. The library is a comprehensive collection of full-text articles and bibliographic records covering the fields of computing and information technology, containing 557,500 articles and 53 peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Sarah Roughley Barake, licensing portfolio specialist at Jisc, said: 

“We are thrilled to offer the sector this agreement. ACM’s openness around costs and pricing was appreciated by the negotiating team and smoothed the path to securing an agreement that is good value for our members and sustainable. This has resulted in more than 70 institutions signing up for the deal, surpassing our expectations.

“The agreement is a real boost for open access and clearly demonstrates ACM’s commitment to that process.”

Wyatt Reynolds, digital library and advertising sales director at ACM, said:

“ACM wishes to thank Jisc for their advocacy on behalf of their member institutions and for their efforts throughout the consultation process.

“We are so happy to see more than 70 institutions sign on to ACM Open, enabling affiliated researchers to publish unlimited open access articles in the Digital Library while retaining copyright to their work.

“This agreement represents a significant step forward for open access in the UK.

“We look forward to continued collaboration as we transition the Digital Library to full open access. As an independent non-profit society publisher, agreements like this are essential to our sustainability. We cannot thank Jisc and the participating institutions enough for supporting our publishing program.”

To read more about the agreement, see the ACM page of the Jisc licence subscriptions manager.

Knowledge Unlatched Presents Open Access Heroes 2023 and Usage Increase of 30%

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA) celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, has announced OA Heroes 2023, which highlights the countries, institutions, publishers, disciplines, and scholarly titles seeing the most usage worldwide. The total user interactions for KU titles (including downloads and views) now stand at 21.3 million—a significant increase of 30% since last year’s KU Heroes announcement.

About 4,000 books have been published OA to date owing to KU’s initiatives, and this number will grow to 4,350 titles by the end of 2023. In addition, nearly 6500 institutions worldwide used KU books last year. Politics and International Studies was the most popular subject, with over 700,000 user interactions.

“OA books are better books. The usage of the titles we unlatch continues to grow, and we are particularly pleased to see the notable jump in total user interactions,” says Dr. Sven Fund, Wiley Senior Director. “These numbers reaffirm the importance of unlatching OA monographs and making them widely available for reading and research.”

KU books are used virtually all around the world. The country that continues to see the highest usage of OA books remains the United States, with nearly 1.4 million interactions, followed by Germany (394,000+), the United Kingdom (390,000+), India (255,000), and Canada (160,000). The top five institutions with the most user interactions in 2022 include five UK universities: the University of Edinburgh, the University of Cambridge, the University of Exeter, the University College London, and the University of Bristol.

The book with the most interactions in 2022 was MIT Press’ Frankenstein: A New Edition for Scientists and Engineers, with nearly 73,000 interactions, followed by UCL Press’ Social Theory after the Internet (nearly 45,000 interactions) and University of Georgia Press’ Medical Bondage (over 36,000 interactions).

As in previous years, OA usage assessment results are based on the data collected from several hosting platforms, including the Open Research Library, OAPEN, JSTOR, and Project MUSE. An infographic that presents the usage data in one place can be downloaded from the Open Research Community website.

Science journals integrate Dryad to simplify data deposition and strengthen scientific reproducibility

The Science family journals have announced a partnership with the nonprofit data repository Dryad that simplifies the process by which authors deposit data underlying new work – a critical step to facilitating data’s routine reuse. The partnership is yet another step taken by the Science journals to ensure data the scientific community requires to verify, replicate and reanalyze new research is openly available.

“Addressing public access to data at scale is a critical challenge,” said Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals. “We’re committed to supporting authors in making their data become more findable, accessible, and reusable going forward.”

The Science journals already require data underlying results in published papers to be publicly and immediately available, a large component of which has been directing authors to data repositories. In recent years, Science editors have been pleased to see an increase in data deposition at these sites; an analysis of Science papers published in 2020, for example, found that nearly three-quarters used external public repositories.

Authors tend to be increasingly familiar with their field-specific data repositories, but where these don’t exist, data deposition presents more challenges.

Partnering with Dryad, a generalist repository, will address this issue for Science journal authors and simplify the process overall.

Because the partnership with Dryad integrates Dryad’s platform with the Science family journal’s submission process, authors will have the option to deposit data at Dryad directly from the submission site of any Science family journal. As authors submit research to the journals, they will be prompted about data availability and welcome to deposit their data to any suitable disciplinary repository. But, if data do not yet have a home, authors will have the opportunity to upload their data to Dryad.

Data deposited at Dryad will be seamlessly and privately available to editors and reviewers during peer review of a Science family journal manuscript.   

“We hope this step will help improve the evaluation of research findings across the scientific enterprise and strengthen the reproducibility of work published in the Science journals,” said Thorp.

To ensure that this service is widely available, the Science journals will cover costs of Dryad data publication for accepted papers. The datasets of accepted papers will undergo Dryad’s curatorial process – to ensure the data is usable – and become public on the Dryad site, with an associated DOI and with links to and from the published research article. Dryad further provides metrics that measure the number of times an individual data publication has been viewed, cited, and downloaded.

The scientific community’s response to Dryad’s platform has highlighted benefits including ease of use of the platform, and the value authors place on data curation by Dryad staff. Others have highlighted the importance of the repository for early-career researchers, who can receive credit for their datasets through Dryad citations, and who can build their reputation for following transparent research practices by depositing in the repository.

The Science journals remain committed to engaging with both the research and repository communities to help ensure that data becomes more findable and reusable going forward. The open availability of data is critical to enabling acceleration of discovery and translation of research into benefits for society.

Update on Open Access for the CERN community

The CERN Open Access policy requires that all peer-reviewed primary research articles from CERN authors are published open access (OA). The CERN Scientific Information Service (SIS) has enabled a range of mechanisms to offer CERN authors a large offer to comply with the policy.

The most important of these mechanisms is SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), which has arranged for automatic OA to research in high-energy physics, published in 11 of the leading journals in the discipline. CERN SIS is also supporting other collective models, with no fees for readers or authors, such as Physical Review Accelerator and Beams published by APS, the Subscribe to Open model for the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, and the SciPost journals.

To ensure that the wide range of disciplines and needs of CERN researchers are supported, SIS has secured agreements with major scientific publishers (AIP, APS, Elsevier, Frontiers, IEEE, IOP, MDPI, Springer, Wiley). These agreements provide automatic Open Access publishing for articles submitted by CERN corresponding authors, while providing readers at CERN with access to the publishers’ content still under paywall. 

In 2023, SIS started three new similar agreements covering the portfolio of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library, ACS (American Chemical Society) and Nature Research Journals. This brings the total number of agreements to 12, collectively covering more than 4,000 journals. In 2023, the agreement with IOP was renewed with an extended scope, including more journals and articles. 

Finally, in certain cases, CERN SIS will cover the costs for OA publishing of articles that are not covered by the existing mechanisms. To be considered eligible, authors must contact SIS prior to submission to journals. It is important to note that articles submitted to journals with extraordinarily high APCs (in excess of CHF 4000) will not be funded by CERN. However, an exceptional mechanism is in place for articles to be published in high-profile journals (i.e. Nature, Nature Physics, Science Advances, etc.) and that are likely to receive a high public attention. In these cases, a detailed justification must be submitted to SIS for review and approval by the Director of Research and Computing, prior to journal submission.

Additional Information about Open Access mechanisms at CERN is available through the CERN SIS website. CERN SIS also provides an Interactive Author Guide, in order to help CERN authors to navigate across the open-access options.

For any question, please send email to open-access-questions@cern.ch or contact us on Mattermost.

ACS Publications reaches major ‘read and publish’ milestone, expanding open access offerings

The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) is excited to announce that as of March 29, more than 1,000 academic institutions are supported by a “read and publish” agreement with the Society. These agreements afford members of participating organizations unlimited access to all ACS journal content and a more seamless avenue for open access publishing. This volume of participating institutions represents 29% of all the academic institutions subscribing to ACS journals. 

With participating institutions of all sizes and in 35 countries, this landmark achievement represents substantial progress toward advancing equity in the sciences, a core value of ACS. This milestone signifies ACS’ support of all students and faculty becoming valuable contributors to the advancement of science. These partnerships increase the volume of trusted, peer-reviewed research that is openly available for the world to consume. 

Expanding global access to peer-reviewed content amplifies learning and enhances opportunities for researchers and students from historically underserved areas. This growth will have an immediate impact in expanding global equity in areas including South Africa (country-wide), Colombia (three institutions) and Mexico (three institutions), as these are in most cases the first agreements of their kind in the region (view a searchable list of all read and publish agreements). ACS has also committed to sponsoring the cost of open access publishing for authors affiliated with primary undergraduate institutions that subscribe to the ACS All Publications journals package.

ACS Publications has achieved this landmark volume in open access publishing because of ACS’ unique and flexible approach. The Society works directly with individual schools and consortia to understand their communities’ information consumption and publication needs and then enhances that understanding by conducting a separate detailed regional analysis. Finally, ACS partners with libraries, researchers, funders and institutional leaders to embark on mutually sustainable pathways to preserve the sanctity of top-quality peer-reviewed research.

More information for authors, librarians and administrators about read and publish programs can be found on the ACS open science website. ACS customers can contact their local sales representative for more information or to be considered for enrollment in this program.  

New Simba Report Unveils Top Trends for Professional and Scholarly E-Book Publishing Market

Launching from Simba Information is the new report, Global Professional and Scholarly E-Book Publishing 2022-2026. This study assesses business performance and emerging trends in the five major professional and scholarly e-book segments: Scientific & Technical; Medical; Legal; Business; and Social Science & Humanities.

In 2021, the top ten competitors in the professional e-book market delivered revenue of $1.16 billion, up 1.8% over 2020. The new Simba report chronicles strategic directions at major professional e-book publishers, including RELX, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Thomson Reuters.

Analysis of the competitive environment, market structure, and growth drivers forms the foundation of this report.  Its coverage encompasses business performance, corporate growth strategies, e-book product strategies, acquisitions and divestitures, and new product launches.

This Simba report analyzes trends that are shaping the marketplace, including:

  • Pain points for customers;
  • Developing threats of e-book regulation;
  • Innovative new e-book formats and features;
  • Emerging growth areas in professional education; 
  • Macro environment impacts for publishers.

The report tracks M&A activity, revealing white space that competitors are exploring now. Major e-book publishers are using acquisitions to build out their platforms and enhance portfolios of content. Others are divesting low-growth assets.

Elsewhere in the report, the reader will find insights about product customers, trends in product use, geographic skews, product formats, and challenges facing the industry.

The report closes with Simba’s near-term outlook for the leading competitors, gaining 1.2% for 2022, and a forecast for the 2022-2026 period. Longer term, Simba projects that the total professional e-book publishing market will reach $2.78 billion by 2026, reflecting economic headwinds during 2023 to 2025.

This Simba report provides detailed analysis of the performance and strategies of leading professional e-book competitors, including RELX, Springer Nature, Wiley, Thomson Reuters, Informa, Wolters Kluwer, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, Pearson, and Thieme.

Open access community framework phase 2 opens for publisher submissions

After a successful pilot in 2022, the open access community framework (OACF) is now open to submissions from not-for-profit monograph publishers until 5 May 2023

The OACF connects not-for-profit ‘diamond’ open access publishers – those that operate under a free-to-read, free-to-publish model – with the higher education (HE) sector.

The scheme was launched to support diversity in the open access (OA) marketplace. Changes to this year’s framework, agreed with the HE sector, are also designed to reduce the burden of Book Processing Charges (BPCs).

Under the scheme, UK higher education libraries are invited to pledge their support to publishers over a three-year period.

The OACF can help smaller publishers expand the number of titles they produce, improve data processes and boost marketing efforts to increase sustainability.

The scheme is also being restricted to monographs and books in series to align it with the strategic objectives of sector libraries and the new UKRI monographs policy. Organisers hope phase two will receive submissions from publishers focusing on British-based authors and content.

To increase the chances of all submissions reaching their funding target, the second phase of the scheme will reduce the number of publishers put forward to the pledging stage of the process.  This change to the scheme has been put in place after feedback to the pilot from stakeholders. 

The successful publishers will be announced at a special webinar in June. Libraries will then be able to pledge support on the Jisc Licensing Manager platform until December 2023 or until publishers have reached their funding target. 

Jisc licensing manager Caroline Mackay said:

“With the UKRI monographs policy launching in January 2024, we are keen to explore and support publishers and libraries with diamond OA initiatives, which collect library funding to operate under a free-to-read, free-to-publish model. 

“This can prove an alternative path to BPCs, which are unaffordable and unscalable for many libraries.

“We hope funding from the OACF will improve the sector’s sustainability by boosting rather than replace existing revenue streams. .”

Sarah Thompson is assistant director (content and open research) at the University of York’s Library, Archives & Learning Services , which participated in the OACF pilot in 2022.  She said: 

“OACF highlighted several diamond initiatives we weren’t already aware of and provided us with an easy route to support those which matched the teaching and research strengths of the University of York.

“The scheme highlights how libraries have an important role in creating a sustainable OA future for book publishing.”

Philippa Grand, press manager of the University of Westminster Press (UWP), one of the successful publishers from the 2022 pilot scheme, said:

“UWP’s experience with Jisc’s open access community framework scheme has been very positive. We are thrilled with the support we have received as a result of taking part. 

“It’s been a fantastic boost internally to have libraries across the UK endorsing UWP’s publishing programme. Schemes like this help libraries and publishers come together to offer a sustainable way forward for small open access publishers.”

To learn more about the OACF’s second phase, including the submission form, licence and additional information, check out the open access pages of the Jisc website.

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