Evaluation of offset agreements – report 3: Springer Compact

This document is the third report of five on the evaluation of offset agreements in Sweden and will focus on the agreement with Springer called Springer Compact and its outcome during 2017. 

 

 The evaluation is conducted to examine the effects of Springer Compact regarding economy, administration, researcher attitudes and research dissemination, and make recommendations for future negotiations with Springer Nature and other publishers. The previous reports were written in Swedish, but the remaining reports will be written in English. Therefore, some of the sections from the previous reports are repeated here to provide a background for the international reader. In addition to this, there is also a section comparing the Swedish Springer Compact agreement to that of three other countries (Netherlands, United Kingdom and Austria) and one society (Max Planck Society).

The report is structured in the following way: below is a short summary. Then the first section presents an introduction, describing open access, offset agreements and the background to why such agreements have emerged, the aim of the evaluation and a brief overview of existing recommendations for negotiating open access with publishers. The next section explains the specific offset model of Springer Compact. The third section makes the comparison between different Springer Compact agreements. The fourth and fifth sections contain the evaluation and recommendations for future negotiations.