Open access policies of leading medical journals: a cross-sectional study

<b>Recommendations about publishing and publication procurement practices across the health and social care system</b><br /> <br /> November 2020<br /> <br /> An independent report by Information Power<br /> <br /> <b>Introduction</b><br /> This study was commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care and Health Education England to inform development of Open Access (OA) strategy and policy in the UK health and social care system. OA ensures that research publications, such as journal articles or books, are freely available online to everyone for access to read and re-use. There are new opportunities to embrace OA approaches that have already been developed, tested, and proven effective for medical research funders, by Plan S [link: <a href="https://www.coalition-s.org/">https://www.coalition-s.org/</a>] for example, and for employers, by members of Universities UK [link: <a href="https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/research-policy/open-science/Pages/uuk-open-access-coordination-group.aspx">https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/research-policy/open-science/Pages/uuk-open-access-coordination-group.aspx</a>] for example.<br /> <br /> The NHS in England is undertaking more research than ever before. However, investment on access to research outputs, through library subscriptions, is relatively low. The available data suggests that Arm’s Length Bodies collectively spend under &pound;1m per annum on primary journals and a similar amount per annum on journals in aggregated databases. NHS Trusts collectively spend an estimated &pound;4m per annum on journal subscriptions. Taken together, the combined NHS expenditure is less than a single medium-sized UK university which seems starkly out of alignment with the importance of evidence-based care decisions.<br /> <br /> In addition, NIHR spends a significant amount to publish articles that report on its funded research. We estimate that this figure is in excess of &pound;10m per annum, however the precise figure is unknown because costs are included in grants awarded through a range of programmes, and open access expenditure is not explicitly tracked at present. We analysed 121,915 papers published between 2015 -2019 by authors employed in, or funded through, the UK health and social care system. 85,542 or 70% of the papers were published Open Access (OA) which means they are freely available for anyone in the world to read. 34% of the total articles are immediately available (19% of all papers were published as fully Gold OA, and 15% as hybrid Gold OA) and 36% of the total articles are available after a delay period of six months (19% were published and made available as Green OA, and 17% as Bronze OA).<br /> <br /> Publishing costs have been paid upfront&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <ul> <li>Gold – costs typically paid by author from research grants</li> <li>Platinum – costs typically paid by employer, funder, or another sponsor often with a per-article charge</li> <li>Diamond – costs typically paid by employer, funder, or another sponsor without any per-article charge</li> </ul> <br /> Near-final draft has been shared publicly, after a delay of six months: <ul> <li>Green – a version of the article (either the manuscript as originally submitted or as accepted, or the final published version) is shared via an institutional repository or subject repository</li> <li>Bronze – a version of the article is shared via the publisher’s site</li> </ul> This represents good compliance with the NIHR OA mandate, and there is scope for further improvement. Papers with a co-author affiliated with a higher education university are more likely to be available OA (80% vs. 65%). There is some degree of overlap, of course, as some papers include authors from both sectors. This suggests that looking to good practice in the UK university sector offers insight about good ways forward.<br /> <br /> Our qualitative research suggests that there is support for the principles of Open Access by researchers, research managers, and library and information professionals in the health and social care system. Funding for APCs is the primary barrier to researchers publishing their articles OA, however researchers affiliated to, or collaborating with someone affiliated to, universities have less difficulty making their research outputs available OA. Central funding, for example block grants, would drive beneficial change as would centralised and strengthened engagement with publishers, and more education and training. Finally, OA is essential but not enough in itself as there is a clear need for short, actionable summaries of research outputs to inform clinical practice.<br /> <br /> The following recommendations focus on opportunities to increase value for money to the taxpayer by eliminating elements of double payment in this system (for subscriptions and OA publication), by raising standards through better access to research information, and by ensuring publicly funded research information is opened for wider economic and social gain.<br /> <br /> <b>Recommendations to project sponsors</b><br /> <br /> (1) Develop a shared OA strategy and common policies and principles<br /> <br /> A shared OA strategy across the health and social care system is needed to advance the quality and speed of research, and to enable equitable access to knowledge. By working together across the DHSC, NIHR, and Arm’s Length Bodies it will be possible to best leverage the sector’s scale, align and change practice, avoid duplication of effort, and obtain best value for money. The NIHR Open Access policy and the Concordat for Maximising Digital Knowledge are good vehicles for this, and the recommendations in this report can form the basis of a shared approach.<br /> <br /> Common policy and high-level principles would enable organisations to focus on collaborative action to drive immediate open access for health and social care system research outputs. NIHR’s direction of travel (i.e., immediate open access with no embargos, no barriers to re-use and dissemination, publications freely discoverable, and reasonable costs covered) resonates with stakeholders with whom we engaged.<br /> <br /> A coordination group across the DHSC, NIHR, and Arm’s Length Bodies is needed to align goals and behaviour, to promote mutual understanding, to cut through complexities and obstacles, and to cultivate buy-in and consensus over time.<br /> <br /> (2) Invest in financial, publication, and compliance tracking<br /> <br /> In order to monitor the impact of your strategy and policies, more attention is needed to build a database that will enable you to understand how information is created, accessed, paid for, and used in the health and social care system. More attention to data gathering can also help you to set policies, negotiate with publishers, and make the case to DHSC for funding.<br /> <br /> We recommend that you establish reliable methods for monitoring research publications going forward: <ul> <li>invest in databases such as Dimensions, Scopus, or Web of Science, and/or by implementing CRIS systems so your researchers or librarians can track research outputs. There are costs in terms of both time and money to each approach.</li> <li>ask Dimensions to set up GRID codes for the remaining organisations, to facilitate future tracking; this can be done relatively simply and at no cost.</li> <li>ensure RORs [link: <a href="https://ror.org/">https://ror.org/</a>] are created for each organisation in the health and social care system and consider working with database providers such as Dimensions, Scopus, and Web of Science (and other similar service providers) to give them the identifiers they would need to improve their matching algorithms.</li> <li>ensure researchers in the health and social care system have ORCID [link: <a href="https://orcid.org/">https://orcid.org/</a>] researcher identification numbers.</li> <li>improve data in ResearchFish by encouraging researchers to supply the DOI of the final published version of articles and to ensure correct employer and funder affiliation data is included in their articles.</li> <li>review what instructions are given to these researchers regarding the correct acknowledgment of employer and funder/s in papers, making sure that the text is specific about how NIHR and the Arm’s Length Bodies should be cited.</li> <li>seek information from other funders for insight into best practice in encouraging grant recipients to include correct employer and funder acknowledgments in papers.</li> <li>track all expenditure made with any publisher, both for subscriptions and for OA. The negotiation of more cost-effective agreements with publishers also requires reliable data about the amounts paid for APCs and of all articles written by affiliated researchers.</li> </ul> <br /> To maximize compliance with your open access policies, incentives and sanctions will be needed. Enabling only papers immediately available open access to be entered for hiring and promotion decisions would be a powerful incentive. Ineligibility for further NIHR funding would be a powerful sanction.<br /> <br /> Ensure that all Arm’s Length Bodies and NHS Trusts are accountable for ensuring the research of their staff members is available open access immediately upon publication. Interviews with researchers suggested that they receive little or no organisational support to make their outputs open access unless they are in the privileged position of having a joint appointment to a higher education institution.<br /> <br /> Rather than have OA funding follow the grant and be administered by individual researchers, we recommend you consider ways of channelling OA funding via these employers, for example by using block grants. While there is a different sort of bureaucracy involved with these, by transmitting money to organisations in this way you would create an environment with increased accountability which will drive up compliance with your policies.<br /> <br /> (3) Invest in improved access to research information<br /> <br /> We recommend you explore ways to increase investment to ensure that researchers and clinicians can both access to the best scientific information from around the world and publish their research articles open access. The public contributor workshops carried out by NIHR as part of their OA policy review identified that even if patients and the public do not access primary research themselves, they expect that clinicians and care practitioners do and are making decisions based on the best scientific information.<br /> <br /> The NHS in England is undertaking more research than ever before. However, investment on access to research outputs, through library subscriptions, is relatively low. The available data suggests that Arm’s Length Bodies collectively spend under &pound;1m per annum on primary journals and a similar amount per annum on journals in aggregated databases. NHS Trusts collectively spend an estimated &pound;4m per annum on journal subscriptions. Taken together, the combined NHS expenditure is less than a single medium-sized UK university which seems starkly out of alignment with the importance of evidence-based care decisions.<br /> <br /> Based on pilots already done [link: <a href="https://community.jisc.ac.uk/system/files/515/NHS%20%28Finch%29%20Pilot%20outcomes%20Nov%202016%20and%20Cochrane%20website%20sharing.pdf">https://community.jisc.ac.uk/system/files/515/NHS%20%28Finch%29%20Pilot%20outcomes%20Nov%202016%20and%20Cochrane%20website%20sharing.pdf</a>], we estimate that providing subscription access to the scope of scientific journals available in UK universities would cost an additional of &pound;1-2m / year. This investment could be targeted in various ways, but one approach to consider is targeting on the journals in which researchers linked to DHSC Arm’s Length Bodies and NHS Trusts publish, but to which there is no access. We also encourage continued migration to central discovery platforms and services.<br /> <br /> NIHR spends a significant but unknown amount per annum on APCs for journal articles. In 2019, 27,416 articles were published by researchers linked to DHSC Arm’s Length Bodies and NHS Trusts. While the good news is that 70% are OA, 30% remain behind publishers’ paywalls. Providing financial support to ensure all research outputs are published gold OA could therefore cost an additional of &pound;17.7m [unfunded articles 8256 x average APC &pound;2147 = &pound;17,725,632].&nbsp; This is clearly a significant additional expenditure, but by implementing the other recommendations in this paper it is possible to significantly reduce this figure.<br /> <br /> (4) Centralise and strengthen your negotiations with publishers, ideally in partnership with UK universities<br /> <br /> Currently the journal content available via HEE is acquired through public sector procurement processes. Whilst this helps ensure best value in markets where there is a choice of supplier, it not ideal in a market where publisher’s journal content is unique and cannot be obtained via other providers. Neither are public sector procurement process designed for the detailed discussion and negotiations needed to develop innovative OA journal agreements which cover both accesses to journal content, and publication in those same journals.&nbsp; We encourage you to centralise and strengthen your engagement with publishers.<br /> <br /> We recommend that you implement a system-wide policy to avoid any form of Non-Disclosure Agreement with publishers. We were rather concerned that one of the Arm’s Length Bodies had done so and were therefore unable to share their expenditure information with any other Arm’s Length Body.<br /> <br /> We recommend you explore a collaborative partnership with Jisc Collections so that your negotiating strength and power is coupled with those of UK universities. This leverage is your best option to control costs and secure better publishing agreements from a range of relevant publishers but particularly the largest. Between them Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley publish 54% of NIHR-funded papers.<br /> <br /> Jisc is expert in negotiating cost-effective journal agreements, but does not have deep sectoral knowledge. We therefore recommend the creation of a strong steering group chaired by HEE to guide them.&nbsp; A potential investment could be the appointment or secondment of a member of staff at Jisc to strengthen their understanding of the health sector and medical publishers.<br /> <br /> Where there are publishers who are important for the health and social care system, but not the HEI part of it, then consider strengthening your own negotiations by partnering with the Royal Colleges and strengthening the knowledge and skills of the NICE negotiating team.<br /> <br /> (5) Pivot to Read &amp; Publish agreements with publishers<br /> <br /> In order to maximise value for the public purse, we recommend you bring together your subscription spend with publishers with your expenditure for OA publishing and seek agreements with publishers that support both reading and publishing. This means that affiliated authors can publish OA without paying an APC. PHE has already done some experimentation in securing such agreements with publishers.<br /> <br /> We recommend that you seek OA agreements with small and medium sized publishers as well as large publishers. There is quality content produced by Society and other publishers, and it is essential for cost constraint that there is good competition between publishers for authors.<br /> <br /> In advance of any negotiations, we recommend that any publisher with whom you have an agreement is required to complete and return a data collection template.<br /> &nbsp;<br /> In the absence of such agreements, we recommend that you do not provide funding for OA publications in a publisher’s hybrid titles. This is because your existing subscription expenditure will give you full access to the content in these titles, and additional APC payments do not lead to a transition to full OA, merely boost publisher profits and surplus.<br /> <br /> (5) Retain your copyright and publish under open licences<br /> <br /> A very powerful way to increase your negotiation power with publishers is to encourage or require employees in the health and social care system to retain necessary copyrights. This is already a requirement for Crown Servants. We recommend that as a condition of NIHR funding, or employment with an Arm’s Length Body, researchers should be required to retain sufficient intellectual property rights to comply with their funder and employer OA requirements.<br /> <br /> Attention also needs to be paid to education around, and compliance tracking of, the open licences attached to OA articles published by researchers in the health and social care system. We strongly recommend use of Creative Commons (CC-BY) and Open Government (OGL) licences across the health and social care system, especially as rights need to be retained in order to enable immediate green OA (see next recommendation).<br /> <br /> DHSC, its Arm’s Length Bodies, and NHS Trusts all publish reports and other materials on their websites. The copyright status of these publications is often unclear, and we would encourage you to use a CC-BY or OGL license wherever possible on these publications.<br /> <br /> (7) Immediate green OA for articles not published gold OA<br /> <br /> As the proportion of articles published OA in the health and social care system grows, you need to ensure that any articles published under the subscription model also become immediately available. Including green OA options – specifically the immediate self-archiving of peer reviewed accepted manuscripts in one health-oriented repository such as Europe PMC – should be an essential part of your strategy. Including this requirement in your agreement with publishers will enable you to maximise OA outputs while constraining costs.<br /> <br /> Understandably publishers have been unwilling to agree to immediate green OA, and there is too often little incentive for them to do so. The immediate availability of accepted manuscripts under a CC-BY licence is perceived by publishers as likely to undermine the value of their subscription sales in all other parts of the world. Every new article published OA and brought out in front of their paywall not only erodes the value of subscription sales to other parts of the world, but can also fuel rival online services underpinned by so-called black OA (i.e., content piracy) [link: Gold, green, and black open access by Bo‐Christer Bj&ouml;rk <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1096">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1096</a>].<br /> <br /> The debate around whether there is risk to publishers of short embargo green OA is as heated as it is long standing. We take a pragmatic view: only the test of time will prove whether or not there is a real risk to subscription revenue from short embargo green OA, however publisher perceptions of risk mean few are willing to incorporate short embargo green OA into their transformative (and other OA) agreements. It is in their interest to control costs and therefore pragmatic for the health and social care system to find a way forward.&nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;<br /> Publishers incur new costs to provide new OA services (e.g. adding author and funder metadata, informing authors about terms of agreements, encouraging authors to share articles providing new reports and metadata, etc). Where publishers expect an uplift in price in exchange for uncapped article numbers in a transformative agreement because the level of publishing output is high, and are willing to provide these new OA services, then we recommend modest financial incentives in otherwise cost-neutral agreements to incentivise the inclusion of immediate green OA. This would help the health and social care system secure more affordable transformative agreements and enable researchers to retain a wide choice in where they publish while delivering both full OA and maximising value for money.<br /> <br /> (8) Open sharing platforms<br /> <br /> Shared infrastructure is required to support the cost-effective dissemination of open outputs by your researchers. A collective approach should be part of your strategy to ensure access to research outputs is not fragmented across different organisations and services, and to avoid duplication of costs.<br /> <br /> In developing the common strategy for this infrastructure is important not to reinvent wheels but to explore the utilisation of existing open platforms.&nbsp; NIHR is one of the funders of Europe PubMed Central which is an open-access repository containing millions of biomedical research papers and has potential to serve as a shared repository service for all your affiliated authors.<br /> <br /> Longer term, you may want to consider not only a repository for access to research, but an open shared platform for publishing NHS health and care research. The AMRC (Association of Medical Research Charities) and Wellcome Trust both maintain open research platforms on which all their funded researchers can publish OA any results they think are worth sharing at an extremely low price. Publication is fast, there is transparent peer review and editorial guidance on making all source data openly available. AMRC Open Research publishes other research outputs, for example posters, slides, and documents, reporting any basic scientific, translational, applied, and clinical research studies: we heard at the round table that these types of research output are as important to the health and care sector as scholarly research. Both the AMRC and Wellcome Trust open platforms use technology provided by F1000 Research Limited.<br /> <br /> A shared open platform such as F1000 research could be helpful in decreasing the costs of OA publishing. The list price of publishing a research article on such a platform is only $1350 per article as opposed to nearly $3000 per article in journals.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> <br /> (9) More OA education and training<br /> <br /> Our interviews revealed widespread support for the principles of open access, but fragmented understanding of all the flavours of open access and constraints to supporting its delivery in practice. The specific requirements vary by stakeholder group and include: <ul> <li>Libraries – open access models, how to support researchers to publish open access, how to work with publishers to maximise open access outputs and constrain costs for access to research, supporting researchers to share via Europe PMC</li> <li>Researchers – open access models, how to obtain funding to support open access publishing, how to identify and avoid predatory journals, how to correctly use unique identifiers for funders/grants/employers/co-authors</li> <li>Research managers – why a research culture is important to the health and social care section, how to define the impact of research undertaken, why it is important that research outputs are available to all, what open access is, open access models, how to ensure research is immediately available open access</li> </ul> We recommend you develop education and training materials and courses that can be used across the health and social care system to minimise confusion and to provide consistent information and guidance.<br /> <br /> (10) Require overviews of research in plain English, and provide training and support to enable compliance<br /> <br /> Your shared strategy and common policies and principles must consider ’actionable knowledge', as well as open access. Research findings must inform practitioner decisions and practice. Plain English summaries of research outputs will aid busy practitioners who do not have time to read research articles, as well as patients and members of the /> There are already some of good practice in the <ul> NIHR for and is and and sharing them across a stakeholder NIHR guidance to researchers on how to plain English are also available services and which could in this example, [link: <a which is a to researchers, them to their work in plain English, and to their by adding and [link: <a is a service which to create a of research articles.</li> </ul>

NIHR Open Access Policy Review Stakeholder Survey Report

Ensuring open access for publicly funded research

The number of Open Access (OA) policies that have been adopted by universities, research institutes and research funders has been increasing at a fast pace. The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) records the existence of 724 OA policies across the world, of which 512 have been adopted by universities and research institutions. The UK is one of the leading countries in terms of OA policy development and implementation with a total of 85 institutional and an estimated 35 funder OA policies. In order to understand and contextualise how OA policies are developed and how they can be effectively implemented and aligned, this brief looks at two areas. The first section provides an overview on the processes evolving around policy making, policy effectiveness and policy alignment. In particular, it summarises the criteria and elements generally specified in OA policies, it points out some of the relevant steps informing the development, monitoring and revision of OA policies, it outlines what OA policy elements contribute to policy effectiveness, and highlights the benefits in aligning OA policies. The second section revisits the issues previously discussed within the context of the UK institutional (universities) OA policy landscape.

The digital age has brought authors of publications many more opportunities to gain further impact and visibility by sharing their work online through websites, pre-print servers, repositories, publishing platforms or other digital venues as well as journals. Publisher copyright policies have not always been enablers of these new practices but change is underway. Europe has also seen a surge in international, national and local Open Access (OA) policies in recent years, a significant one being Plan S with its requirements related to rights retention and open licensing. How far are publishers in supporting authors in this change? In early 2020 SPARC Europe commissioned a report to gain a better understanding of current copyright and licensing practices amongst scholarly journal publishers based in Europe and how these are presented to academic authors. The key purpose of the study was to provide evidence on how publisher policies support OA and to see whether the complexity of the copyright and self-archiving landscape amongst publishers has simplified over time. We also explored how Plan S-ready publishers were with regards to the first principle of their policy related to authors or their institutions being required to retain copyright to their publications, calling for all publications to be published under an open license, preferably CC BY, immediately and under no embargo. Research was undertaken on various levels: the 2020 study reviewed the copyright, self-archiving and open licensing policies from 10 large legacy publisher websites and then asked these publishers to verify these findings. We also analysed the policies of pure open access journals in Europe from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). To limit the scope, Europe was taken as the focus of this research. This paper will firstly demonstrate how diversely publishers present and share information on their copyright, licensing and self-archiving policies and how challenging this can be for authors and the institutions that support them. We will also share findings on the specifics of publisher policies be they hybrid or pure OA. For example, examining how far large publishers currently allow authors to retain publishing rights for articles, to what extent they allow zero embargoes when self-archiving or how far pure OA journals use the CC BY license. This paper ends by making a number of recommendations to publishers, research funders, institutions and authors to ultimately support authors to more easily navigate this policy landscape and to be able to publish immediate OA.

The Plan S Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) requires authors who are submitting to subscription journals to inform publishers that the author accepted manuscript (AAM) will be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. The laudable stated aim of the RRS is to achieve immediate open access to research outputs, while preserving journal choice for authors. However, proponents of the RRS overlook the significant administrative and legal burdens that the RRS places on authors and readers. Even though compliance with existing green open access (self-archiving) policies is poor at best, the RRS is likely to rely on authors to successfully execute the CC licensing of their work in the face of publisher resistance. The complexity of copyright law and CC licensing gives many reasons to doubt the legal validity of an RRS licence grant, which creates legal risk for authors and their institutions. The complexity of RRS CC BY licensing also creates legal risk for readers, who may not be able to fully rely on the reuse rights of a CC BY licence on the AAM. However, cOAlition S has released no legal advice that explains why the RRS is valid and legally binding. Publishers of legacy subscription journals have already begun implementing strategies that ensure they can protect their revenue streams. These actions may leave authors having to choose between paying publication fees and complying with their funding agreements. The result is that the RRS increases the complexity of the copyright and licensing landscape in academic publishing, creates legal risk and may not avoid author fees. Unless increased complexity and conflict between authors and publishers drives open access, the RRS is not fit for its stated purpose as an open access strategy.

The number of Open Access (OA) policies that have been adopted by universities, research institutes and research funders has been increasing at a fast pace. The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) records the existence of 733 OA policies across the world, of which 520 have been adopted by universities and research institutions. In order to understand and contextualise how OA policies are developed and how they can be effectively implemented and aligned, this brief overviews the processes evolving around policy making, policy effectiveness and policy alignment. In particular, it summarises the criteria and elements generally specified in OA policies, it points out some of the relevant steps informing the development, monitoring and revision of OA policies, it outlines what OA policy elements contribute to policy effectiveness, and highlights the benefits in aligning OA policies.

AAAS misses opportunity to advance open access

As many readers of Translational Vision Science & Technology know, ARVO has been committed to making scientific information readily available to the eye and vision science community. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, for example, already has a 6-month embargo date, and the Journal of Vision and Translational Vision Science & Technology always have had free access, although the copyright has been held by ARVO. As of January 1, 2016, all ARVO journals will be open access. Flat article pricing will apply to all manuscripts submitted on or after December 1, 2015. After careful consideration, the ARVO Board of Trustees has set the flat fee at $1,850. A discount of $350 will be offered to corresponding authors who are ARVO members at the time of article acceptance. All papers published on or after January 1, 2016 will be open access based on a chosen license. The default license is a CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Some agencies require a different open access license—CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)—and additional fees will apply in these cases. ARVO will hold the copyright to all content published before January 1, 2016, but this content will be free access. If you have any additional questions regarding the open access policy please check the ARVO website at http://arvojournals.org/SS/openaccess.aspx.

The Lancet journals welcome a new open access policy

This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances. In addition to the welcome diversification in journal choices for authors looking for open access venues, there are many positive aspects of Science Advances: its broad STEM scope, its interest in cross-disciplinary research, and the offering of fee waivers. While we welcome the commitment of the Association to open access, we are also deeply concerned with the specific approach. Herein, we outline a number of suggestions that are in line with both the current direction that scholarly publishing is taking and the needs expressed by the open access community, which this journal aims to serve. The first of these issues concerns the licensing terms of the journal articles. The default choice of a non-commercial licence (CC BY-NC) places unnecessary restrictions on reuse and does not meet the standards set out by the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Many large funders, including Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust, do not recognise this as an open license. The adoption of CC BY-NC as the default license means that many researchers will be unable to submit to Science Advances if they are to conform to their funder mandates unless they pay for the upgrade to CC BY. There is little evidence that non-commercial restrictions provide a benefit to the progress of scholarly research, yet they have significant negative impact, limiting the ability to reuse material for educational purposes and advocacy. For example, NC-encumbered materials cannot be used on Wikipedia. The non-commercial clause is known to generate ambiguities and uncertainties (see for example, NC Licenses Considered Harmful) to the detriment of scholarly communication. Additionally, there is little robust evidence to suggest that adopting a CC-BY license will lead to income loss for your Association, and the $1,000 surcharge is difficult to justify or defend. The value of the CC BY license is outlined in detail by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. We raise an additional issue with the $1,500 surcharge for articles more than 10 pages in length. In an online-only format, page length is an arbitrary unit that results from the article being read in PDF format. Can the AAAS explain what the additional costs associated with the increased length are that would warrant a 50% increase in APC for an unspecified number of additional digital pages? Other leading open access journals, such as PeerJ, the BMC series, and PLOS ONE, offer publication of articles with unlimited page lengths. The extra costs create constraints that may adversely incentivize authors to exclude important details of their study, preventing replication and hindering transparency, all of which are contrary to the aims of scholarly publication. Therefore it seems counterproductive to impose this additional charge; it discriminates against researchers' best effort to communicate their findings with as much detail as necessary. We feel that the proposed APCs and licencing scheme are detrimental to the AAAS and the global academic community. As such, we recommend that Science Advances: 1. Offers CC BY as standard for no additional cost, in line with leading open access publishers, so authors are able to comply with respective funding mandates; 2. Provides a transparent calculation of its APCs based on the publishing practices of the AAAS and explains how additional value created by the journal will measure against the significantly high prices paid by the authors; 3. Removes the surcharges associated with increased page number; 4. Releases all data files under CC0 (with CC BY optional), which has emerged as the community standard for data and is used by leading databases such as Figshare and DataDryad. We hope that you will consider the points raised above, keeping in mind how best to serve the scientific community, and use Science Advances to add the AAAS to the group of progressive and innovative open access scholarly publishers. We hope AAAS will collaborate with the academic community to facilitate the dissemination of scientific knowledge through a journal committed to fully embracing the principles of Open Access. We kindly request that you allow your response(s) to be made public along with this letter, and look forward to hearing your response soon. (Please note that the views expressed here represent those of the individuals and not the institutions or organization with which they are affiliated)

See video of the presentation.Toward the end of the two-year EC-funded project Mediterranean Open Access Network (MedOANet; www.medoanet.eu) this presentation offers a summary of its activities and specifically focuses on the culminating outcome of the project, the guidelines for policy development, directed to research performing organizations and research funders in six countries: Greece, Italy, Turkey, France, Spain and Portugal. The guidelines are to be released in English in all six languages of the project partners in September 2013.Purpose of the project is to support and strengthen coordinated policy development among funders and research organizations of the six countries (www.medoanet.eu). For two years the project has enabled open access policy developments through activities at the national level, such as the development of task forces and national conferences that brought together major stakeholders and policymakers, as well as regional developments through a European workshop in Braga, Portugal in early spring 2013. The project has, further, mapped the open access policy situation in the six countries, the results of which are to be published in the early fall 2013. Three surveys carried in six countries among research funders, research performing organizations and publishers demonstrate that the momentum towards open access requires specific policy actions to actually render publicly funded research openly accessible to all.The guidelines under preparation by the project discuss the key principles and processes to be followed by funding and research performing organizations in establishing open access policies, highlighting the most important steps necessary in defining and implementing effective policies. Significantly, they also offer model policies for research funders and research performing organizations. The model policies have been elaborated on the basis of current models and recent relevant developments, and emphasize mandatory green open access. The proposed presentation will discuss their components in detail. The effect of the guidelines and model policies are eagerly awaited and already expected to be significant as a number of institutions in Greece and other countries are discussing adopting them together.

Open letter to the Society for Neuroscience

Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere (SOLA) is going to implement new policy changes starting from 2018 in order to comply with a fully Open Access policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. This license permits users to adapt, distribute, and reproduce the articles of SOLA in any medium, even commercially, provided that the users give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the original source, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made, without obtaining permission from the Meteorological Society of Japan (MSJ). The copyright of articles will be retained by the authors. Authors will be required to sign a License to Publish form in order to give the MSJ permission to reproduce the article in SOLA under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Another change is to employ Article Processing Charge (APC) in order to cover the publication cost such as copy editing, typesetting, and online procedures under the Open Access policy with the CC BY license, shifting from the current page charge. Author(s) or their institution(s) are requested to pay an APC to the MSJ with the amount of 80,000 Japanese Yen for members of the MSJ and 100,000 Japanese Yen for non-members of the MSJ (both with consumption tax if applicable). There will be a transition period for the articles that have been submitted in 2017 and will appear in early 2018; either the current page charge or the APC, a lower amount, will be asked to pay. I believe that this policy change would further enhance the status of SOLA in the international community.

According to the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) only 8 research institutions from the Republic of Moldova (12%) approved an Open Access Policy (OAP). All these institutions are universities and none is a research institute or research funder, although research and development activities in the Republic of Moldova are funded basically from the state budget. The paper contains analysis of the situation regarding Open Access Institutional Policies in the Republic of Moldova. Results of a study regarding the attitude of Moldovan academia to open access to research outputs and identified problems on this issue are presented in this work. Emphasis is given to tools and information systems like Institutional Repositories (IRs) that promote open access for research outputs. The paper reveals the barriers for adoption and / or implementation of an open access policy in a research organization and provides ways for their overcoming.