The agreements are the first to result from work undertaken by Jisc Collections, in which smaller publishers are offered a sustainable transition to OA.
These read and publish two-year pilots allow 100% of UK scholarly output to be published OA in the societies’ hybrid journals, with some including fully OA titles in the fixed-price deals.
The five societies are:
The Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), a partnership between six health research charities, including the Wellcome Trust, invested £1.3m in OA publishing fees (APCs) with UK-based self-publishing learned societies between 2016 and 2018. These five publishers account for just under a third of this investment.
Through these agreements, the sector transitions away from hundreds of individual APC payments to a fixed annual payment between the institution and the publisher, significantly reducing the administrative burden on researchers, institutions, funders and publishers.
Source and further information via Jisc.