Open Access Workflows
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.
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.
Capture and Record
As part of this initiative, 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 if it is unlimited. If it is limited, indicate the number of tokens that are covered by the agreement.
- Create an "Electronic Collection - Subscription" PO line to reflect the "Read" part of the agreement. Link it to the created license.
- 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.
- It is recommended to create a dedicated “Open access” fund.
For more details, see Open Access in Alma – Best Practices.
Insights
Analytics reports will be introduced, summarizing the amount of money spend on article processing charges (APC) with various vendors. A comparison will be introduced between requests to publish that are covered by Transformative Agreements licenses and those that are paid explicitly by the institution.
Providing institutions with insights about cost per use and article processing charges (APC) will empower them to make informed decisions during transformative negotiations with publishers, optimizing resource allocation and enhancing the value of their investments.
This is planned for 2025 H1.