KOALA: Collaborative open access funding successful | open-access.network

Six series and journals from the media and social sciences will be funded by almost 70 institutions in the KOALA consortium from 2023 onwards The search for institutions to participate in the collaborative funding of the first two bundles in the KOALA project ("Konsortiale Open-Access-Lösungen aufbauen" – Building consortial solutions for Open Access) has been successful. From January 2023, a total of six titles from the media and social sciences will be jointly funded for three years by almost 70 different institutions. The publishing bodies commit to meeting the KOALA minimum standards from 2023, which include not only open access, but also issues such as long-term archiving, metadata standards, ethical guidelines and no data tracking. The standards are modelled on Plan S, a publicly funded strategy to promote open access to scientific knowledge, and other relevant initiatives. The editorial offices and publishers participating in KOALA receive extensive support in implementing these standards. Publishing without additional costs and bureaucracy The KOALA consortium model is intended, among other things, to offer authors the opportunity to publish open access without additional costs and bureaucratic effort. "In this model, libraries play an important role in financing open access as part of their service mandate," explains Dr. Irina Sens, Deputy Director of TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology. "In this way, they make a decisive contribution to the open access transformation and to establishing fair and sustainable ways of funding diamond open access," Sens continues. "KOALA ties in with traditional consortium models, supports the transition of journals to open access and enables reliable funding of publications from traditional publishers as well as publisher-independent, scholar-led journals," adds KOALA project manager Marco Tullney. [...]