Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access

"The OA transformation can only succeed if public infrastructures are expanded beyond publication service providers. With a view to long-term archiving and redundancy of storage, the WR recommends that a network of German institutions be commissioned with the complete storage of all openly available academic publications worldwide. It would be desirable for publishers to be involved in this. To conclude contracts with other, even smaller, publishers beyond DEAL, the scientific institutions can draw on the negotiation structures and experience of Project DEAL. The WR also welcomes an expansion of this approach to publishers with slightly smaller market shares and recommends the formation of consortia for smaller and medium-sized publishers as well so as to simplify the negotiation situation."