Dutch Universities, Journal Publishers Agree on Open-Access Deals | The Scientist Magazine®

"Despite some difficult negotiations, academic institutions in the Netherlands have been securing subscriptions that combine publishing and reading into one fee.

In the Netherlands, as in many other European countries, universities are pushing for scholarly journals to become open access. Driven in part by the E.U.’s mandate to make all scientific articles freely available by 2020, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), which represents 14 of the country’s academic institutions, has been negotiating new subscription deals with publishers. Many of these discussions have been fruitful—over the last few years the consortium has secured 100-percent open-access agreements, where all papers with Dutch corresponding authors are made freely available, with major publishing houses such as SpringerNature and Wiley.

There have, however, been clashes with a few publishers along the way, leaving researchers without access to some journals. In general, VSNU is pushing for academic publishers to adopt a so-called “publish-and-read model,” which combines viewing paywalled articles and publishing open-access reports into one fee. “Our goal is to reach 100 percent open access, but we also want to keep the costs that we pay at a reasonable level,” says Koen Becking, president of Tilburg University’s executive board and a chief open-access negotiator for VSNU. When the consortium stepped in to start discussing nationwide contracts in 2014, it “made clear to the publishers that we did not want to pay more for our reading contracts,” Becking tells The Scientist, “and that we wanted to make a substantial step towards open access.”

Last month, VSNU announced that it had established new publish-and-read contracts with two publishing houses, SpringerNature and Oxford University Press (OUP). The latter occurred after many months of suspended negotiations. Around the same time, discussions with the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) halted due to disputes about fees, leaving Dutch universities without access to newly published articles in RSC’s journals since April 1...."