Best Practices for Open Access in Alma
The industry is in a transition from a journal subscription world to an open access article-level economy: a growing number of publisher agreements present possibilities for open access publications. Infrastructure, standards, and practices should be updated to reflect this. For more information see Open Access Workflows.
There are several players in open access processing, main ones are:
- Authors
- Libraries
- Publishers
Some institutions assign libraries the task of supervising allocated funds for covering article and book processing charges related to open access publication. The focus of this initiative is on capturing the acquisitions part of the process – expenditures, funding, etc. The focus of this initiative is not on the published articles.
Key Elements
It is possible to keep information on open access elements in Alma:
|
Element |
Description |
Representation in Alma |
|
Transformative agreement |
Agreement with a provider that includes “read” and “publish” parts. |
Will be presented in Alma as a license of “Transformative agreement” type.
|
|
Request to publish |
Request from an author to publish an article. Can be covered by a transformative agreement, if there are available tokens or the transformative agreement is unlimited. |
Will be presented in Alma as a po line of type “APC” (article processing charges).
|
Best Practices for Managing Open Access in Alma
- Create a license of “Transformative agreement” type to represent the transformative agreement. Indicate in the agreement that it is unlimited. If it is limited, indicate the number of tokens that are covered by the agreement (see Adding a License).
- Create an "Electronic Collection - Subscription" PO line to reflect the "Read" part of the agreement. Link it to the created license (see Creating APC PO Lines).
- For each request to publish from this publisher, create a PO line of type “APC”. Link it to the license. If there are available tokens, they will be used and the PO line should be marked as “no charge”. If no tokens are left, a price should be specified as well as a fund which will be used to cover this (see Creating APC PO Lines).
- It is recommended to create a dedicated “Open access” fund.
Creating APC PO Lines
To record requests to publish by authors, and article processing charges, create a PO line of type "Article Processing Charges (APC) - One Time".
- Navigate to the Order without inventory page (Acquisitions > Purchase Order Lines > Order Without Inventory).
- Fill the form fields with relevant information about the article; author, article name, indication for being an open access publish request, etc.
- Link the PO line to the “Transformative agreement” license.
- If the license has available tokens, the PO line should be created as “no charge” (as its charge is covered by the transformative agreement).
- If there is no remaining token, a price should be specified as well as the relevant fund.
Analytics
Use Analytics reports to measure how much money is spent on APC for each vendor. This this can help the institution better prepare to the next negotiation with the publisher regarding their subscription/transformative agreement.
We plan to add OTB reports in the future.