Portugal National Funder FCT Agrees Transformative Agreement with Elsevier

"Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics has entered into a transformative agreement with b-on to enable continued reading access for researchers affiliated with b-on institutions and open access publishing. This is the first time Elsevier has signed a transformative agreement to support Portugal. It will benefit the member institutions with access to Elsevier's extensive collection of journals on ScienceDirect. The cost of publishing open access is covered under the terms of this agreement up to a pre-set annual cap. When publishing open access in hybrid journals, eligible corresponding authors do not have to pay an article publishing charge (APC). The new three-year contract will run until 31st October 2024. Joana Novais, Manager of the b-on Consortium said: “This agreement lays an important stepping stone in the direction of Open Access in Portugal. It is a great honour for b-on to be able to contribute to this transition to OA by providing the authors of its member institutions the possibility to publish an annual average of 2000 OA articles in hybrid journals without incremental costs.” The b-on Consortium was founded in 2004 and represents 64 institutions, mainly higher education and research institutions across Portugal. It is managed by FCCN, a unit of FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology...."