LIBER 2021 Online: Call for Papers
Open Access: Five Principles for Negotiations with Publishers
LIBER, Europe’s leading association of research libraries, presents Five Principles for libraries to use when conducting Open Access negotiations with publishers.
The principles are based on the experiences of LIBER libraries in the past two years, and aim to guide libraries and consortia as they shift from a reader-pays model (subscription licensing) to an author-pays model based on Article Processing Charges (APC).
With these principles, research libraries are encouraged to make the move from paying for information access to organizing the publishing costs for their researchers. The Five Principles are:
- Licensing and Open Access go Hand-in-Hand – The world of subscription deals and APC-deals are closely linked. Nobody should pay for subscriptions and pay APCs at the same time (‘double dipping’). Each new license agreed on should therefore contain conditions about both sides of the coin. Increased spending on APCs should result in proportionately lower spending on subscription fees.
- No Open Access, No Price Increase – There is enough money in the system already. Libraries have paid annual price increases of up to 8% for years, supposedly to allow publishers to innovate. A key feature of innovation for the research community is that research outputs are freely available. Therefore if an agreement with publishers on Open Access cannot be reached in our contracts, future price increases should not be accepted.
- Transparency for Licensing Deals: No Non-Disclosure – The practices of libraries should fully reflect their commitment to Open Access. Licensing agreements should therefore be openly available. Society will not accept confidential agreements paid for with public money in the form of non-disclosure agreements, as recent developments in Finland and The Netherlands have shown.
- Keep Access Sustainable – To avoid putting more money in the system, and to strengthen Open Access, some libraries have given up their rights to perpetual access in license agreement. Perpetual access is, however, critical in a quickly-changing publishing environment. Libraries must secure sustainable access to content.
- Usage Reports Should Include Open Access – Although APC-buyouts are becoming more common, reporting about Open Access is still rare. Just as libraries receive reports about downloads and usage in the subscription world, they should also receive reports on Open Access publications. It is normal to receive insight into what we pay for.
These Five Principles are part of LIBER’s ongoing commitment to facilitate knowledge exchange between its libraries, national governments and stakeholders. They are inspired by other statements including the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science and the OA2020 Initiative.
Our Principles align with the recently issued Recommendations on Open Science Publishing from the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP). The OSPP guidelines emphasize sustainability, transparency, incentives, research evaluation and community involvement. They also call for stakeholder communities, EU member states and the European Commission to jointly assess and identify how the Commission’s goal of full Open Access by 2020 should be achieved.
For More Information
Please contact LIBER President Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen or Matthijs van Otegem, co-chair of LIBER’s Open Access Working Group, with any questions about this statement. The full statement and accompanying poster can also be downloaded.
A 6th principle is missing: If an institution covers the APC for journals of a given (large) publisher, the same deal should be available to other publishers as well.
To quote OASPA: “Discussions and solutions continue to be focussed on the largest, mixed-model publishers. While it is this segment of the market on which funders’ attention – and spend – is concentrated, the vast majority of publishers within the so-called ‘Long Tail’ (the majority of open access publishers) appear to be absent from these negotiations. Many of these publishers are too small to negotiate the kind of ‘transformative’ national Big Deals we are seeing for the largest publishers, while exclusively open access publishers without legacy subscription businesses are also unable to participate. Many are not even of sufficient size to make agreements directly with institutions. For a healthy, competitive market in the longer term, the needs of fully open access publishers must not be overlooked at this critical stage. Smaller publishers, learned societies and innovative new platforms will be at a significant disadvantage unless they are properly considered and steps are taken to ensure they are able to compete fairly in the market. “.
We see deals that are in gross violation of this principle (e.g. Project DEAL). And from the authors’ perspective, authors want to be able to publish in the journals they want to publish in, not necessarily in the journals that have a “deal” with the library. An institutional open access fund combined with a generic infrastructure to process payments would be a much fairer way to deal with publishers and APC’s.