As mentioned in previous posts, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot has now started implementing pre-payment agreements with a number of publishers: BioMed Central, Copernicus, Wiley and BMJ.This requires a new set of workflows to be tested. So far we have usually been receiving funding requests for accepted manuscripts in fully Open Access journals via the OpenAIRE system. This is of course still the standard and recommended procedure to apply for funding. But from the beginning of June, we ar...

After funding over 400 Open Access publications during its first year of operation, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is now moving onto the pre-payment agreement implementation stage. OpenAIRE has recently signed agreements and deposited a pre-paid fund with a number of publishers – BioMed Central, BMJ, Copernicus and Wiley – in order to be able to fund eligible manuscripts upon acceptance. This means a much simpler workflow for authors, since no invoice will be required anymore to receive t...

A recent SPARC Innovator award winner, Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) was built around the principles of open research in scholarly communications. Traditionally, a research project ends up with just a few articles published in scholarly journals after many years of work. But why communicate just research articles at the end of a cycle?Research articles are just a small component of the research cycle. What about all the other project outputs - research ideas, grant proposals, methodologies, ...

A guest post by Dawn HibbertOpen Access Advocacy Librarian, University of StrathclydeEmbargo periods set by publishers continue to undermine, or at best, delay open access (access to scholarly research without having paid a subscription or cost to access).  Whist publishers have been quick to argue that without embargo periods libraries would no longer purchase subscriptions to their journals, and that it could potentially eat into profits due to the journals perceived “shelf life” this does not...

On Tuesday 17th May, the scholarly communications community on Twitter erupted at the news that publishing giant Elsevier had acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a pre-print and publishing community focusing on social sciences and law. The acquisition seems designed to continue Elsevier’s move away from a content-driven business strategy towards one oriented on services and the monetisation of data and analytics, building on their purchase of Mendeley. Elsevier’s press release s...

The publisher engagement plans for the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot involve signing pre-payment agreements with publishers as a means of improving the dissemination of this funding initiative towards eligible researchers and projects. Moreover, pre-payment agreements will very much simplify the invoicing workflows, making the funding of APC payments much quicker and easier for authors.Following these plans, OpenAIRE has signed a first contract for a pre-payment agreement with Ubiquity Press ...

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and scientific information provider Elsevier have reached an agreement in principle  that continues to provide academics at Dutch universities with access to all Elsevier journals and allows them to publish through gold OA in a selection of Elsevier journals at no additional cost to the corresponding author.  The Dutch universities aim to make 30% of their researchers’ publications Open Access (OA) by 2018. For the first ti...

At the moment, when an author gets an approval for a funding request from the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot s/he is asked to tell the publisher to please issue the invoice for the APC payment to Athena Research Centre and then to upload such invoice in the central system in order for the payment to the publisher to be processed by the project. This is a time-consuming, suboptimal procedure that could be significantly simplified if the Pilot had pre-finance schemes in place with publishers in ...