Celebrating 30,000 Open Access Articles … PARs, RAPs, and Exploring Implications | The Scholarly Kitchen

Last week Wiley and Projekt DEAL announced a transformative Publish-and-Read agreement that will, by a conservative estimate, giving the world at least 30,000 additional open access articles over the next three years. Under this agreement, articles by authors from participating institutions will be published open access in Wiley journals and everyone at those institutions will be able to access all Wiley content at no additional cost. The agreement was announced at the Academic Publishing in Europe conference and a copy of the agreement FAQ in German is available in the Internet Archive.

This agreement is a significant development. To my knowledge it is the first and currently only publish-and-read agreement between libraries and a publisher. A publish-and-read (PAR) agreement is one in which fees are paid only for publishing and reading is provided at no additional cost to consortium members. This is in contrast to a read-and-publish (RAP) agreement, in which there is a fee for reading and additional fees for publishing, which are then bundled together, which is the kind of agreement that the University of California System is pursuing.

Given the significant milestone that the Wiley/DEAL PAR agreement represents, it is not surprising that it garnered a lot of attention both at the conference and online. The news ricocheted across Twitter and prompted intense discussions of how the agreement would be seen relative to the requirements of Plan S, a topic of focus for the conference, as well as the implications for negotiations with other publishers and the like.