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Cambridge’s Transformative Journals see 70 per cent leap in research published open access

The amount of new research published open access (OA) in Cambridge’s Transformative Journals (TJs) leaped by almost 70 per cent in 2021.

Cambridge University Press revealed the figure in an update to the cOAlition S group of funders on the progress of its TJ programme.

The update also shows that the programme exceeded its open access growth target for the year, playing an important role in Cambridge’s plans to transform the vast majority of the research publishing in its journals to OA by 2025.

Overall, the proportion of research articles published Gold OA in Cambridge journals increased to 36 per cent last year – a 47 per cent increase on 2020. The publisher expects that to have reached 50 per cent by the end of this year.

Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Cambridge University Press, said: “We are very proud of the progress we have made with our Transformative Journals programme over the last year and with the overall increase in the amount of research we are publishing open access.

“We are building an open future, unlocking the potential of research through the greater collaboration, transparency and accessibility that open access brings.”

The update clearly shows the impact of publishing open access, with OA articles getting about 1.6 times more citations and about 3.5 times more full text views on Cambridge’s publishing platform, Cambridge Core.

Uptake of Gold OA in Cambridge journals has also been driven by the increasing number of Transformative Agreements the publisher has reached with higher education and research institutions around the world, repurposing their existing subscription spend to provide opportunities for their researchers to publish OA. As more and more authors become eligible for Gold OA under such agreements, so more journals will be able to increase the number of articles they publish OA.

While not all journals in the TJ programme met their individual targets last year, these have been granted an exception by cOAlition S, meaning authors can continue to publish with those journals in compliance with Plan S requirements.

Mandy said: “We will continue to be a strong voice for the benefits of open; to register new TJs as quickly as we are able and look forward to making it possible for every author to publish their research as open access.”

Hindawi Report – Taking an open science approach to publishing

We are delighted to launch Hindawi’s journal reports today. These reports, developed with the help of DataSalon, showcase a range of journal metrics about the different publishing services we provide for our journals. By exposing more detailed data on our workflows – from submission through peer review to publication and beyond – we are giving researchers, partners, and funders a clearer view of what’s under the ‘journal hood’. We are also raising greater awareness of less talked-about services, such as how we are helping to make the publication process more equitable and published articles more accessible and discoverable.

This is the first phase of our journal reports and detailed metrics are available by following the “see full report” link from the journal’s main page. In this first phase, our reports give greater insight into acceptance rates and decision times, but also the median time in peer review and the median number of reviews per article. Alongside traditional metrics, such as citations and article views, the reports also display maps of the geographic distribution of authors, editors, and reviewers.

The final section demonstrates how we make articles more accessible and discoverable. It takes advantage of data from Crossref’s participation reports, which we extracted from Crossref’s open API. The section includes the percentage of articles in the journal that are open access (i.e. 100%), and the proportion of corresponding authors with an ORCID ID. It also shows the extent to which abstracts and citations are open. Hindawi supports the initiative for open citations (I4OC) and we are also a founding organisation for the initiative for open abstracts (I4OA). Because our metadata is machine readable and openly available, it makes the articles we publish more discoverable than publishers who don’t make this information openly available. The infrastructure for Open Access is also a key building block of Open Science.

By sharing this information, we want to help researchers make better-informed decisions about where to publish, instead of them relying on limited and often problematic indicators, such as the Journal Impact Factor or the presence of a journal in a particular (and disproportionately western) database. We want to expose services that are becoming increasingly important for researchers practising Open Science, but which aren’t yet as valued as traditional indicators, such as machine readability; the openness of references and abstracts; and the use of persistent identifiers to ensure that different research outputs can be digitally connected. At a time when there are real concerns about the trustworthiness of science, and of publishing, we want to foster trust through openness.

Inspired by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), our journal reports are part of our commitment to an open science approach to publishing. DORA is now 10 years old and set out a key principle for responsible research assessment – that researchers should not be judged on where they publish. It has grown into a global organisation that is leading and actively promoting “the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated” and is providing resources to do this. There are also many other aligned initiatives, such as INORMS and the European Commission’s Towards a reform of the research assessment system, and we hope our new reports can play a role in helping this reform.

In addition, when we began creating our journal reports, Hindawi was also a member of the price and service transparency pilot organised by cOAlition S. As part of the pilot, we were tasked with providing data on aspects of our workflow (such as time to ‘first decision’ or the number of peer review reports per published article), as well as our pricing makeup. This framework now forms part of the cOAlition S Journal Comparison Service for librarians and their Journal Checker Tool for researchers. But why not also make this data openly available to everyone?

This is what we are now doing because Hindawi is committed to taking an evidence-informed approach to publishing, which is what Open Science is all about. But getting this data together and ensuring consistency between our internal and external reports takes time and we have a way to go.

Mathias Astell, Chief Journal Development Officer at Hindawi commented:

“These reports mark an important step in increasing transparency of journal performance and makeup – helping researchers, institutions, funders and publishing partners to have a clearer understanding of the value a journal is providing. We believe that clearly presenting the geographic representation of our journals will start to help subvert historical geographical biases in publishing. We also believe that openly sharing the metrics that make a difference to authors’ experience is vital in moving past the problematic ways of traditionally assessing journals and research. This is the first iteration of our new reports, and we are planning to further increase transparency and openness through future phases.”

By starting to unbundle and share data on our different services, we aim to unravel the ‘black box’ of publishing and open it up to independent scrutiny. Having a more transparent and collaborative approach to our workflows will also help fuel innovation in publishing and further support researchers, funders and institutions who are committed to Open Science. 

See an example report here >

First articles published in IOP Publishing’s new open access environmental journal

IOP Publishing (IOPP) has published the first articles from the new, open access journal, Environmental Research: Climate featuring research from world-renowned climate scientists. The journal represents one of three new interdisciplinary titles for 2022 that will extend IOP Publishing’s Environmental Research series to six open access journals that provide universally accessible publishing options for the global environmental science community. 

Environmental Research: Climate is devoted to addressing the causes, consequences and solutions of climate variability and change and publishes full length research papers, without word restriction, alongside other content including reviews and perspectives. The journal builds on the established reputation of Environmental Research Letters and shares the same modern publishing principles as part of IOP Publishing’s expanding Environmental Research series that now spans the most critical areas of environmental science and sustainability in support of the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals. 

The Environmental Research series of journals all combine outstanding levels of author service, inclusive editorial policies, strict quality assurance and open science principles at their core. In the spirit of transparency and reproducibility, authors publishing in the journal are encouraged to share data and code where appropriate for the benefit of the research community. Authors also have the option to submit their papers for double anonymous and transparent peer review. In support of the community and our first authors, the open access Article Publication Charges (APCs) are being covered by IOP Publishing for all articles submitted to Environmental Research: Climate through to the end of 2023. 

Editor-in-Chief for Environmental Research: Climate, Professor Noah Diffenbaugh, Senior Fellow at Stanford University says: “In the past two decades there has been a true explosion of climate research and we are excited to offer a high-quality outlet for the growing body of research on the causes, consequences, and solutions of climate change. I’m delighted by the first content and look forward to working with IOP Publishing to establish Environmental Research: Climate as a leading publishing option for the climate research community, underpinned by open science principles.” 

Published in the first issue is an impactful review that examines the current state of knowledge which shows what extent extreme weather events can be attributed to human induced climate change. Dr Friederike Otto, from the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, co-author of the study comments: “Understanding the role that climate change plays allows us to determine the real cost that carbon emissions have in our lives. However, while we’ve made great progress, the full extent of the impact that climate change is having today is still not well known, in particular, beyond changing weather. The new Environmental Research: Climate journal provides a platform for climate scientists to further develop and apply existing tools and explore and discover new policies to tackle climate change.” 

Dr Tim Smith, Associate Director at IOP Publishing says: “The development of our Environmental Research series builds upon the established reputation and publishing values of Environmental Research Letters and enhances the role we want IOP Publishing to have in serving a multidisciplinary field of great importance. The first articles in Environmental Research: Climate as the latest addition to the portfolio provide an early glimpse of the quality and breadth of science that the community can expect from a journal aimed at delivering a combination of outstanding publishing services and content for researchers worldwide.” 

Ground-breaking open research platform, Octopus, to launch 

Octopus aims to change the way research is published and improve its quality.

Ground-breaking publishing platform Octopus is being launched next week (29 June), and researchers are invited to attend the online event to find out more.

Octopus aims to enable fast, free and fair publishing of research that is open to all, and which focusses on the intrinsic quality of research. 

It sets out to avoid researchers being tempted to ‘sell good stories’ in their work, and instead rewards them for rigour and specialism. Whilst traditional journals will remain a way for research findings to be disseminated, Octopus will provide a primary research record for publishing and research as it happens. – the place where the research community will be able to record full details of ideas, methods, data and analyses, and for these to be peer reviewed and assessed for quality.

It will allow faster sharing of results with credit given to individual work at all stages of the research process – including peer review. 

 Shifting the incentive structure of research 

Last year, Octopus Publishing Community Interest Company (CIC) was awarded £650,000 funding over three years in collaboration with Jisc from Research England’s emerging priorities fund to support the technical development required to move Octopus from a prototype to a global service. 

Unlike a traditional research publishing model, Octopus breaks down the publication of research into eight smaller modules or elements:  

  • Problem  
  • Hypothesis/theoretical rationale  
  • Methods/protocol  
  • Data/results  
  • Analysis  
  • Interpretation  
  • Real-world implementation  
  • Peer review  

These elements are linked together to form branching chains, but each can be authored by different people. 

As Octopus’s director and creator, Dr Alexandra Freeman, says:

“Octopus is designed to shift the whole incentive structure. By changing what they’re being assessed on, we can allow researchers to concentrate on the quality of their work, not the way they ‘sell it’ to others.

“The platform will remove the judgement of work based solely on the ‘findings’, which can lead researchers to prioritise impressive-sounding results over solid theory and methods. It will encourage researchers to specialise in their skills as theorists, methodologists, data collectors, analysts, implementers or critiquers, rather than try to attempt all of these at once.

An entirely new model

Thanks to the funding from UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), and the design of the platform, research recorded in it is free to read and free for researchers to publish, in an attempt to break down barriers to research for researchers with fewer resources. It also builds in ways to try to minimize bias in the assessment of work based on a researcher’s gender or the institution they work at. The emphasis is on speed, openness, fairness and ease of use, in order to prioritise pure, intrinsic quality of research.  

 Jisc’s Director of open research services, Liz Bal, says:  

“The vision for Octopus is strongly aligned with Jisc’s overall mission in leveraging technology to improve research.  Open by design, Octopus represents an entirely new publishing model, with the potential to transform research communication and research culture.”

Research England’s director of research, Steven Hill, says: 

“The funding to support Octopus aligns with Research England’s strong commitment to open research and the government’s People and Culture Strategy. 

“There is real potential for this service to positively disrupt the publication landscape and provide a tool for the research community, which is owned by the community.”

Increasing support for change

Dr Freeman adds:

“Octopus is something very different for the research community, and I expect it will be hard for many people to adjust their mindset to the new way of approaching research work that it encourages.

“At the moment it’s as if we are encouraging researchers to build their own tall towers, and judging them on how high they can reach, but ignoring the towers’ strength. It doesn’t result in a solid edifice – reliable findings that we can continue to build on and use – it’s not collaborative and it’s not using everyone’s strengths and skills to best effect.

“Instead, Octopus encourages every researcher to think of each piece of work they do (like coming up with an idea or collecting some data) as a brick that they are placing in a wall. They are incentivised to make each brick as solid as possible, and make sure it’s put in the right place. That way, out of all the solid bricks, will emerge solid towers on firm foundations: research integrity in the fullest sense, and findings that society can rely on.

“I think many people recognise that in order for research to serve society, and to tackle the problems such as reproducibility that we’ve seen grow over the years, something like this needs to happen. And I’ve been thrilled to find that many working in journals, funders and institutions are rallying round Octopus and want to see it succeed, as well as researchers themselves.”

 How to get involved 

Researchers are also welcome to join the Octopus user community and can join the conversation and keep up to date with activities through the Octopus user community JiscMail list, or can join the discussion via Twitter @science_octopus. 

Initially, Octopus’s eight publication types are most closely aligned with the scientific research process. However, researchers from all disciplines have expressed interest in extending the platform and are invited to get involved in the work to do this. 

Wiley and Italian Consortium Bibliosan announce Open Access agreement

Global research and education leader Wiley today announced a new four-year agreement with Bibliosan, a consortium of medical research institutes and hospitals in Italy.  

This agreement will provide 68 institutions with access to Wiley’s complete journal portfolio and enable participating researchers to publish accepted articles open access in all of Wiley’s more than 1,600 hybrid and gold open access journals. 

“Wiley is extremely pleased to announce this landmark agreement, which is the first of its kind for healthcare institutions. Bibliosan institutions contribute greatly to the advancement of science and this agreement will help them embody the best of research and clinical practice,” said Liz Ferguson, Senior Vice President, Wiley Research Publishing. 

Moreno Curti, M.D., Bibliosan Coordinator, said: “It is the first year that Bibliosan has signed Transformative Agreements, that is, both Read and Publish, with Wiley. This is an important step towards making the results of publicly funded research available, making it easier for researchers of Bibliosan members, the Italian Scientific Research and Care Institutes, to publish their research in open access journals, both hybrid and gold.” 

Wiley has open access agreements with more than 40 partners globally, and has signed a number of new agreements, which span eight countries across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa, earlier this year.  

Frontiers – It is not transformation if nothing changes

The substantial benefits of open access (OA) publishing are within our reach, but legacy publishers are employing commercial tactics to delay the necessary transition.

This paper exposes several of the negative, often unintended, consequences of “transformative agreements” (TAs).  It argues that these agreements, sold as a pathway to open science, in fact reinforce the status quo.  TAs maintain paywalled access as the standard financial model in publishing.  They are negotiated in the absence of basic competition and procurement rules.  And by concentrating resources into silos for a few incumbents only, they pose a threat to the diversity of the publishing ecosystem, locking out innovators, including the very players who demonstrate the benefits of OA publishing.  Deployed as a commercial tactic, these agreements will stall the establishment of a transparent and competitive marketplace for professional editorial services.

In 2018, an influential group of research funders, recognizing the superior value proposition of OA publishing, came together under the banner of cOAlition S.  With their Plan S, they declared they would mandate immediate and universal access to all the articles that resulted from the research they funded.  Pressure from legacy subscription publishers subsequently led to concessions that have weakened that founding mission.  The most damaging of these concessions was the acceptance of the “hybrid” model.  This option granted “transformative” status to paywalled access as long as it was accompanied by the publication of some open access content.  

This hybrid concession is a loophole that large traditional publishers are exploiting to prolong and validate their current business model and practices.  The TA thus represents the offspring of the existing “Big Deal” of bundled services, but now with a costly additional channel for OA publication. 

As the COVID pandemic has so powerfully shown, the effective dissemination of validated scientific knowledge is at a critical stage in the research-innovation cycle – and vital if we are to overcome the challenges we face as a society.  Plan S intended to “shock” the system into a logical state of affairs with the backing of research funders.  However, for as long as the “Big Deal” approach is maintained, legacy publishers will continue to negotiate conditions that guarantee their market share, with consortia paying high prices to a small number of publishers (and offering, in effect, a massive subsidy).  

To tackle climate change, technologies such as solar panels, fuel cells and electric vehicles have benefited from a policy of subsidies, pushing society away from the dangerous status quo of fossil fuel consumption.  By contrast, and analogy, we see that TAs are incentivizing pernicious behavior, supporting the paywalled status quo, hindering positive change and suppressing the innovative models that offer true fully open solutions.

If initiatives such as Plan S are to make full OA a reality, then funders, institutions and libraries must tackle monopoly legacy models which hinder innovation. We believe the signatories of Plan S, institutions and libraries should: 

–       Ensure their funding allocations meet the needs and requirements of authors and the academic community. 

–       Negotiate conditions such that all published research is truly, immediately and fully open according to a binding timeline; with a minimum schedule in which at least 75% of content is OA across a publisher’s full portfolio by the end of 2024.  

–       Insist on agreements that are transparent and visible to all stakeholders, with a clear attribution of costs to products and services, allowing a credible assessment of value and unbundling.

–       Establish a truly fair competitive landscape by applying the principles of common commercial conditions and basic rules of public procurement.

Fully OA publishers already offer quality and innovation at scale, with better value for money and greater impact than legacy publishers.  They are driving efforts to meet the political and societal need for truly open science.  At Frontiers, we stand ready to work with all stakeholders to meet this call to action, to share our knowledge and data in doing so, and to see Plan S delivered.

Taylor & Francis chooses the Charlesworth Gateway to integrate its submission workflow into WeChat

Taylor & Francis has partnered with the Charlesworth Group to integrate its manuscript submission workflow into WeChat, using the Charlesworth Gateway. Authors based in China submitting articles to over a thousand Taylor & Francis journals will now be able to access regular status updates on their submission, in Chinese via WeChat.  

The Gateway is Charlesworth’s proprietary technology platform. It integrates with STM Publisher platforms and systems and can be connected to any WeChat account. The platform’s analytics service provides real-time data on the engagement of authors with the service and provides WeChat follower analytics.   

WeChat has over 1.25 billion monthly active users, as well as a social platform it seamlessly offers ecommerce and payments, making it the most widely used social platform in the country. WeChat users expect to be able to engage with brands via the app and through enhancing the service offered via their WeChat account, Taylor & Francis can create a more engaging community hub for its China based author community.

“In today’s global market, authors understandably expect a seamless end-to-end submission experience, and we are working to constantly refine and develop this”, says Heather St Pierre, Director of Product Management, Taylor & Francis. “We’re delighted that by partnering with Charlesworth, we’re able to further enhance that experience by integrating the publishing process into the digital channels most aligned with how authors want to work.”

Michael Evans, Global CEO of The Charlesworth Group, comments, “Authors in China are used to engaging with brands which offer access to their services via WeChat. Through creating a great localised experience via WeChat for its authors, Taylor & Francis is positioning itself as a publishing brand which understands author needs in China, to further grow its already strong position in the market.”

PLOS ONE and protocols.io collaborate on expanding service to all Lab Protocol authors

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced that it is expanding a service offered to Lab Protocol authors through its partnership with protocols.io: the team at protocols.io will format step-by-step protocols for their platform at no charge and at any stage of the Lab Protocol writing or review process, even prior to submission.

This service will save time for PLOS ONE authors who may not be familiar with the rich functionality of the protocols.io platform, which includes features like timers, labels for critical steps, and the option to embed media objects like videos. The team at protocols.io can also provide feedback to help authors improve the protocol’s presentation, clarity, and reproducibility.

“One of the things I love about Lab Protocols is that they help researchers get credit for method development and publish sooner in their careers. Now, with the expansion of the protocol entry service, we are going a step further in making researchers’ lives easier. I am really excited about this expansion and believe that it is a unique offering in the protocol publishing space,” said Lenny Teytelman, CEO of protocols.io.

Previously, the protocol entry service was offered to Lab Protocol authors whose submissions had already been sent out for peer review. By expanding it to all current and future Lab Protocol authors, PLOS ONE is making it easier for authors to provide an optimized step-by-step protocol as part of their initial submission.

Authors also have complete control over how and when the protocol is made available at protocols.io. The newly formatted protocol will not be visible to anyone else until the author has been able to inspect it and make changes. Authors can then choose to share it publicly, or to generate a private link accessible only to PLOS ONE editors and reviewers. In the event that the Lab Protocol is not accepted at PLOS ONE, authors can still choose to share the step-by-step protocol on protocols.io for other researchers to use and build on.

Lab Protocol authors can access this free service by emailing plosone@plos.org to request a customer code, which will be provided in two to three business days. The author can then enter the code when submitting their step-by-step protocol to the protocol entry service.

“We are delighted that the team at protocols.io is now offering this service to all Lab Protocol authors. Helping authors make the most of the unique features of the protocols.io platform will ensure that the protocol is widely used, shared and further developed. This service is very much aligned with our goal of making the submission process as painless and straightforward for our authors as possible,” said Emily Chenette, Editor in Chief of PLOS ONE.

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, signs the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

Developed during the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, DORA commits to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. Under the agreement, participating publishers agree to provide a range of article-level metrics to encourage assessment based on the scientific content of the article rather than the journal in which it was published; encourage responsible authorship practices; remove reuse limitations on reference lists; and reduce the constraints on the number of references in research articles. To date, more than 21,000 individuals and organizations in nearly 160 countries have signed DORA.

SPIE currently publishes the Proceedings of SPIE and 14 peer-reviewed journals through its SPIE Digital Library platform. The SPIE Digital Library, the world’s largest collection of optics and photonics applied research, comprises more than 560,000 publications covering topical areas ranging from biomedical optics and neuroscience to physics and astronomy-related technology.

“SPIE is proud to join the growing number of organizations signing DORA,” said SPIE Director of Publications and Platform Patrick Franzen. “Making research accessible to the scientific and technical community is an integral part of the Society’s mission and that includes upholding responsible scholarly research-assessment practices across our publishing portfolio.”

“I warmly welcome the decision by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, to sign DORA,” said DORA’s Chair Dr. Stephen Curry. “Learned societies play an influential role in the scholarly ecosystem, and I look forward to seeing how SPIE’s implementation of the DORA recommendations will foster the propagation of responsible research assessment practices both within the Society and by its members.”

Chinese institutions on the rise, but the United States holds its position at the top of the 2022 Nature Index Annual Tables

China sees the largest increase in research output among the countries named in the top ten and closes the gap on the United States which has seen a drop in output but retains its place as the leading country

The Nature Index Annual Tables, released today, examine the institutions and countries that contributed most to high-quality natural-sciences research in 2021. China had a strong year, second for research output overall, as measured by Share* and with 14.4% growth in output in 2021 compared with 2020, the largest increase among the top ten countries in the Annual Tables.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences leads the institutional tables for the tenth consecutive year since the Index was established, with a Share of 1,963.00 in 2021. This is more than double that of Harvard University, in second place, with a Share of 910.93. Four of the ten leading institutions come from China, and of those ten, only the Chinese institutions have shown an increase in adjusted share** from 2020–21.

Reflecting the overall picture of China’s dominance, another Chinese institution, The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (8th overall) has seen growth of 21.4%, making it the fastest rising institution in the Index. Of the 50 fastest rising institutes, the top 31 are from China, where in the 2021 tables only two of the top 10 were Chinese institutions. This year just ten of the 50 come from outside China. 

Elsewhere, whilst the United States retains its place as the top nation for research output, the amount of research has declined by 6.2%, the largest decline posted by a top 10 country and its steepest fall since 2017. Other countries among the top 10 have also seen a decline in output: Germany, third overall, has seen a downward turn of 0.7% and the United Kingdom, in fourth, has seen a drop of 5.7%. It should however be borne in mind that the Index is a zero sum game with a finite number of about 60,000 articles published per year in the Index journals. With China and its institutions rising so much, other countries and institutions have to fall in the competition to publish in the 82 journals of the Index.

Commenting, David Swinbanks, Founder of the Nature Index, said: “The Nature Index Annual Tables show that China’s investment in research through their large, and now well-established institutions is resulting in sustained research output in the natural sciences. In 2021 their investment in research accounted for 2.4% of China’s GDP, showing their commitment to this area. This year, their funding impact on their research growth stands out more when compared to the changes we have seen in other countries, particularly Germany, the UK, France and Japan.”

On the conclusions we can draw from these tables, Swinbanks added: “While the Annual Tables are a good indicator of high research output in the natural sciences, we encourage readers to use the findings alongside other scientific outputs such as data, software and intellectual property when considering research quality and institutional performance.”

Clarivate statement on OCLC lawsuit

Clarivate is disappointed to report that the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has filed a lawsuit against Clarivate PLC and subsidiaries, including Ex Libris, and ProQuest in connection with our development plans to create a free and open community peer-to-peer sharing platform for metadata created and owned by libraries.

Together with development partner libraries, Clarivate is developing a community-based platform to allow librarians and information experts at museums, educational establishments, cultural and scholarly organizations and more, to freely and easily collaborate to enrich and share metadata to surface and expose their own bibliographic resources and content to a global audience. It will be open to any organization of all sizes and type. All records shared will be available under an appropriate open licence, to allow records to be copied and used in original or modified form. The initiative supports library commitments to open up access to metadata via sharing and supports library strategy to seek operational efficiencies as it makes workflows simpler, more efficient and more effective.

Clarivate is committed to delivering intelligent technology solutions in impactful and value-added ways – to better serve our customers and we will continue to deliver new value, provide seamless workflow and enhance the customer and user experience to help them fuel innovation.

We believe the lawsuit is without merit and we will vigorously defend our position.

SAGE Publishing and the University of California Announce a Transformative Agreement to Expand Reach of UC Research

SAGE Publishing and the University of California (UC) announce an agreement to expand open access publishing opportunities for researchers at all 10 UC campuses. Running through 2024, the agreement will provide funding for UC researchers to make their SAGE research articles free and openly available to the world. SAGE is one of the largest publishers of UC research in the social sciences and humanities.

“This agreement advances UC’s goal to accelerate the shift to a more open, fair, transparent and sustainable scholarly communication system,” said Derjung Mimi Tarn, Professor of Family Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and chair of the UC Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC). “This effort will advance the public mission of UC and its ongoing work to make the products of UC research and scholarship as freely and widely available as possible.”

Under the agreement, the UC Libraries will contribute $1,000 to all article publishing fees (APCs) and will cover the costs in full where there is no available grant funding to pay the remainder of the APC, or when the APC is less than $1,000. UC authors will also receive a discount on open access publishing in SAGE journals. The agreement covers all hybrid journals via SAGE Choice and most of SAGE’s fully ‘gold’ open access journals. The agreement also includes significantly expanding access to all journals in SAGE’s 2022 Premier Journals Package. UC authors will publish open access using the SAGE Open Access Portal.

“This partnership will allow all UC researchers to increase their reach and provide extra support for those who don’t have the funding to do so — a situation that is all too common in the social and behavioral sciences,” said David Ross, SAGE’s Vice President of Open Research. “We’re committed to expanding open access opportunities for researchers and to doing it in a way that meets their own varied needs as well as the needs of the librarians who support them.”

An early driver of open access, SAGE was a founding member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), as well as one of two publishing partners in the European Commission-funded FP7 Framework project, the Study of Open Access Publishing. Additionally, in 2011 SAGE launched SAGE Open, the first broad-spectrum open access journal aimed specifically at the social and behavioral sciences.

To learn more about SAGE’s open access agreements, visit the SAGE Publishing website. To learn more about UC’s open access publishing agreements, visit the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website.

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