VSNU Open access newsletter March 30, 2017

"Open access developments in the Netherlands

2017 open access deals

The VSNU has reached an agreement with the publisher Brill regarding open access. Academics from 10 different Dutch universities will have online access to all journals published by Brill. This amounts to 240 titles in the fields of the Humanities, Social & Behavioural Sciences, Biology and Law. Thanks to this agreement, academics who are affiliated with a Dutch institute not only have access to articles but also can publish open access in Brill’s journals in the fields of International Law and International Relations without being subject to additional fees. Some 40 titles are involved. The agreement encompasses this year and 2018. The publisher Walter de Gruyter likewise reached an agreement with the Dutch universities regarding online access publications. Authors may publish open access at a 90% discount in the journals to which the various university libraries subscribe. In total, this covers 64 journals.

FOI request

In September 2016, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request was submitted by all Dutch universities relating to open access. The goal of the request was to determine how much universities pay publishers to publish open access articles by academics affiliated with the university. VSNU, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands, compiled a table of the most relevant elements in the requested contracts. The table includes only those contracts entered into before the FOI request was submitted (September 2016). In addition to a table, the full text of the contracts is also available on the VSNU website. The details for Springer and Elsevier are not included in this table. These publishers lodged an objection to making the contracts public and consequently the details are not publicly available yet. The hearing for this objection was held on 23 March. The publishers based their objection on their market position and the agreements made regarding confidentiality. The appeals committee will issue a judgement at a future date.

University of Twente striving for complete open access by 2020

The Executive Board of theUniversity of Twente is following European Union policy in order to achieve complete open access to all academic publications by 2020. The university recently set down policy in order to achieve this goal. As from now, academics affiliated with the University of Twente are required to make their publications available to UTpublications, the university’s archives. UTpublications is part of a global network of academic information. At present, there are 6700 hybrid journals in which the academics can publish for free. According to university librarian Marjolein Drent, the new policy focuses primarily on articles published via the green route. Nevertheless, there are still several problems with the policy: ‘For example, if an academic doesn’t publish open access, we are not allowed to make the resulting PDF freely accessible via UTpublications’, said Drent.

Monitoring open science worldwide

The European Commission has launched a website to monitor open science worldwide. This website is part of the European Committee’s dedication to open science. The website provides various stakeholders including researchers, policymakers, financiers, librarians and publishers access to data and trends in the field of open science.

Investigation into fraudulent journals

Polish scholars conducted research on fraud committed in the world of academic journals. In an experiment, the fictitious Anna O. Szust, expert in cognitive and social sciences, sent an unsolicited application to 360 journals in various scientific fields asking to join the editorial board of the journal in question. Forty-eight journals were willing to include the fictitious Szust. A large number of the 48 journals involved ‘predatory’ publishers with an open access component. This article shows that a continuous focus on ensuring the quality of open access publications must be maintained. The journal Nature gave extensive coverage to this study. The article also paid attention to the pressure on researchers to publish. This pressure may contribute to the dramatic increase in predatory journals given the tremendous importance of publications to researchers’ career paths."