Editorial - Opportunities seized and opportunities missed

As you know, for Dutch researchers the number of opportunities for cost-free open access publishing in solid-quality journals is huge, with over 8,000 journals covered by national deals with leading publishers. Recently Cambridge University Press was added to the list, with almost 300 journals in all fields.
But dó you know? It may appear that many UG and UMCG researchers do not. Not all of the opportunities offered by the VSNU deals are seized by authors, with an uptake of no more than 40% for Elsevier, and just over 20% for Wiley. This applies not just to Groningen, but to all Dutch universities. Why could that be? Perhaps the persistent communication efforts of VSNU, the universities and the university libraries often do not land. But more importantly, we know that corresponding authors are misled or deterred by the online manuscript submission workflows of some publishers –which still come up with high article processing costs (APC’s), when in fact there is a 100% ‘discount’ and the author pays nothing. We are working on this with the publishers, but in the meantime, in case of doubt use tools like the national journal browser and do not hesitate to ask openaccess rug.nl .
Also the various local arrangements for APC discounts (Cogitatio, BMJ, BioMed Central, SpringerOpen), will help to achieve the 100% open access set as a target by the National Plan for Open Science.

In the series of interviews with local scholars, this time we spoke with two philosophers about their publication strategy and its constraints in general, and open access book publishing in particular. “Take back control over academic publishing” has come out as a motto.

Regarding ‘green’ open access –based on after-peer-review versions of articles– to the call ‘go green and upload your article to Pure’, in this newsletter we add the reader side of things. Many scholarly articles of which the ‘version of record’ is behind a paywall can with some effort be found cost-free on the Web, with tools like Kopernio, Unpaywall and Google Scholar Button –a fine illustration of the potential of green open access. Do see the helpful infographic composed by the Central Medical Library.

Finally, with regard to research data, we discuss the opening of the Academic Data Center Groningen, a cooperation between UG and the Central Statistical Office (CBS), and the tension between openness and confidentiality in the type of data it works with.

Enjoy reading this new open access newsletter!