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ObjectivesAcademical and not-for-profit research funders are increasingly requiring that the research they fund must be published open access, with some insisting on publishing with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)...

Open letter to the Society for Neuroscience

AAAS misses opportunity to advance open access

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.

This editorial explores the rationale behind transitioning the ESNBU journal’s content licensing from CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) to CC BY (Attribution). For a decade, the journal operated under the CC BY-NC license to restrict commercial use, but this approach has unintentionally limited its reach and visibility. The objective is to address these limitations and promote unrestricted dissemination of scholarly content. The analysis involved a review of the journal’s indexing history, feedback from database providers, and usage statistics over the past ten years. We examined cases where the NC clause hindered the journal's inclusion in databases, especially those operated by commercial or for-profit entities. We also reviewed existing literature on licensing impacts in open access publishing to understand broader trends and potential benefits of a transition to CC BY. The study found that the NonCommercial restriction created significant barriers to the journal's visibility and dissemination. Several commercial and academic databases opted not to index the journal's content due to ambiguity around the "commercial use" clause. By transitioning to a CC BY license, we anticipate enhanced indexing opportunities, increased content integration into educational resources, and a broader reach, ultimately leading to higher citation rates and greater impact. Moving to a CC BY license aligns the journal with the principles of Open Science, fostering unrestricted access to knowledge. This change supports wider dissemination, potential for increased collaboration, and enhanced visibility in academic databases. Future analysis will focus on measuring the impact of this transition on the journal's citation metrics, user engagement, and overall accessibility.

Rethinking Scientific Publishing

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)

Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica (AOGS): Coming-of-age to embrace open science.

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.

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.

Reports an error in "A grain of truth in the grain size effect: Retrieval practice is more effective when interspersed during learning" by Hilary J. Don, Shaun Boustani, Chunliang Yang and David R. Shanks (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2024[Nov], Vol 50[11], 1791-1810). In the article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed, and the Creative Commons CC BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "2024 The Author(s)," and the omitted disclaimer is present as: Open Access funding provided by University College London: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by/4.0). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2025-46535-001). Retrieval practice is a powerful method for consolidating long-term learning. When learning takes place over an extended period, how should tests be scheduled to obtain the maximal benefit? In an end-test schedule, all material is studied prior to a large practice test on all studied material, whereas in an interim test schedule, learning is divided into multiple study/test cycles in which each test is smaller and only assesses material from the preceding study block. Past investigations have generally found a difference between these schedules during practice but not during a final assessment, although they may have been underpowered. Five experiments confirmed that final assessment performance was better in students taught using interim than end tests in list (Experiments 1, 2, and 5) and paired associate (Experiments 3 and 4) learning, with a meta-analysis of all available studies (k = 19) yielding a small- to medium-sized effect, g = 0.25, 95% confidence interval [0.09, 0.42]. Experiment 5 finds that the higher level of practice retrieval success in interim tests contributes to the grain size effect, but the effect is eliminated if these tests are too easy. Additional analyses also suggest that the forward testing effect, in which tests promote subsequent learning, may be a major cause of the grain size effect. The practical and theoretical implications of these demonstrations of robust grain size effects are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "One thought too few: An adaptive rationale for punishing negligence" by Arunima Sarin and Fiery Cushman (Psychological Review, 2024[Apr], Vol 131[3], 812-824). In the original article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed, and the Creative Commons CC BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2024 The Author(s)," and the omitted disclaimer is present as: Open Access funding provided by University College London: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; http://creativecommons.org/li censes/by/4.0). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2024-74001-001). Why do we punish negligence? Some current accounts raise the possibility that it can be explained by the kinds of processes that lead us to punish ordinary harmful acts, such as outcome bias, character inference, or antecedent deliberative choices. Although they capture many important cases, these explanations fail to account for others. We argue that, in addition to these phenomena, there is something unique to the punishment of negligence itself: People hold others directly responsible for the basic fact of failing to bring to mind information that would help them to avoid important risks. In other words, we propose that at its heart negligence is a failure of thought. Drawing on the current literature in moral psychology, we suggest that people find it natural to punish such failures, even when they do not arise from conscious, volitional choice. This raises a question: Why punish somebody for a mental event they did not exercise deliberative control over? Drawing on the literature on how thoughts come to mind, we argue that punishing a person for such failures will help prevent their future occurrence, even without the involvement of volitional choice. This provides new insight on the structure and function of our tendency to punish negligent actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

An interesting move from Nature Publishing Group today… In a press release dated 7 November 2012 they’ve announced they’re allowing the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to be applied to articles in some (but not all) of their journals, specifically citing Wellcome Trust and RCUK policies that now require their funded authors to publish Gold OA with a CC BY license (or alternatively to use the Green OA route), recognizing that more

IntroductionA colleague recently proposed submitting an article about work to which my lab had contributed to the journal Neurology. I said, Neurology is a fine journal—some of my favorite authors have published there (smile)—but, like many traditional journals, they don't allow authors to re-use their own words for future book chapters. That's true even if a pre-publication version ends up later on PubMed Central. At least, they don't allow this without their deciding whether to deign to grant permission in each case. It may surprise you to know that many traditional / hybrid journals that tout an Open Access option—usually an expensive one—allow only a noncommercial license (like the CC BY-NC license). That sounds fine until you learn that adapting your own words to contribute to a book or to a site like eMedicine counts as commercial use! Personally, in an age in which the Paper User Interface is almost obsolete, and I almost always find papers from PubMed or Google, giving my rights away to a journal (by copyright transfer or an exclusive license to publish) is just ridiculous.I replied to my colleague suggesting she submit instead to a journal that allowed the authors to re-use their own words freely (as with the CC BY license), and went on to explain other benefits of fully open access publishing. I've discussed some of these advantages elsewhere \cite{25580234}. She replied, I'm curious to know how publishing in these open access platforms has been received by your department? There's a clear message in mine that they want to see pubs in journals with good impact factors, especially for promotion consideration. This is a reasonable concern, of course, and a common one, and I acknowledged that at my career stage the pressure is not on me to the same extent. But I gave her some thoughts anyway, and then I realized that others might find them interesting. So here they are.The real answerThe real answer is for leaders to judge papers (much less faculty) on different metrics. The JIF was never meant to grade the quality of an individual paper, and it does it poorly. Even collectively, higher impact factor journals are more likely to publish articles that are retracted than are lower impact factor journals (among other reasons, think about this: “novel” results imply a lower prior probability of truth). Besides, if by impact you mean total number of citations, some OA journals are way in front (e.g. Frontiers in Psychology is the most cited multidisciplinary psychology journal in the world, and there have been something over 200,000 citations to articles in PLOS ONE).Being down on the journal impact factor (JIF) is not just my opinion. You can listen to some Nobel laureates criticizing it here.Some young scientists are adopting an open-only policy and let the chips fall where they may, and several of these scientists have been quite successful. In the meantime . . .But in the meantime, here are some options for those in my colleague's position. First, there are open access journals with a high JIF. Here is a short list of a few open access journals I've published in or considered, to show the wide range of JIFs for journals that allow authors to keep their rights:

<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>