Navigating the Complexities of Open Access: A Case Study from University of Copenhagen

Abstract

Imposed by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education & Science, 100% of research outputs in Denmark should be publicly available starting from 2025. Like many others, University of Copenhagen (UCPH) is subject to a national OA strategy as well as Plan S becoming a reality. These changes impact millions of researchers, and all institutions, publishers, and funders worldwide have to take action to, on the one hand, drive change towards OA and Open Science, and on the other hand, comply with the increasingly enforced policies. At UCPH, a bit more than 40% of research outputs are published OA today. In addition, UCPH already spends around 2 M€ per year in APCs ─ a cost that the university cannot afford to increase. The situation is faced with numerous challenges with increasing complexities of different policies from different funders, different research assessment frameworks, different publisher business models as a response, and a great deal of fragmentation due to the lack of collaboration between the stakeholders. UCPH and the Royal Danish Library have therefore partnered with ChronosHub, a platform and service provider for streamlining publication processes. In this talk, we’ll share our experiences of solving these challenges from an institutional perspective. How did we bridge the communication between institutions, publishers, and funders, to unburden both administrators and the individual researchers? What are the effects? What have we learned? And what are the remaining challenges? The presentation will be held by Martin Jagerhorn, Business Development Advisor, Chronos Hub; and Michael Svendsen, Head of Section for Research Support, Copenhagen University Library, Royal Danish Library. Three actionable takeaways: • Most universities are decentralized, which requires patience and a hands-on, stepwise roll-out to test and evolve the strategy along the way. • It’s possible to mandate a service like Chronos Hub, but in any case, essential to drive uptake by clearly communicating benefits and incentives for the researchers, like no redundant reporting, no compliance issues, no admin for payments, etc. • Identify and close the gaps systematically by integrating additional data sources to get closer and closer to 100% automation and 100% coverage of all articles.