What is an Open Access Agreement?
Transitional Agreements (aka Read and Publish) are agreements between an institution and a publisher where the subscription and publish fees are bundled into one package.
Members of the institution then have read access to the publications and can also publish gold open access with the costs covered by the agreement.
The aim of the agreement is to transform the journal from a traditional subscription model to a fully open access one.
While the transition isn’t happening as quickly as we would have liked, and Jisc continue to evaluate and negotiate agreements on behalf of the sector, there are benefits to having these agreements in place.
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Any corresponding author currently affiliated to the University is eligible to publish open access in participating titles. This includes researchers who wouldn’t otherwise have access to funds to pay for open access.
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They cover all disciplines.
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Without having to pay individual Article Processing Charges (APCs) there is much less admin involved in opting for open access.
Which Publishers Does the University of Aberdeen Have Agreements With?
The University of Aberdeen currently has agreements with 19 academic publishers.
Agreements vary between publishers. Some include only hybrid journals while others include both hybrid and fully open access journals.
If fully open access journals are not included, you may receive a discount on the APC. Make sure you have funds to pay before you submit to a journal that requires an APC. Central funds are not available out with the block grants. Block grant funds (for UKRI, Wellcome and British Heart Foundation research)are also limited, and you should ensure that funds are available before you commit to an APC.
How Do the Agreements Work?
Corresponding authors affiliated to the University of Aberdeen are identified by the publisher as eligible for the agreement by their institutional email address, their affiliation, or their IP address.
They are offered open access under a Creative Commons Licence with the APC covered by the agreement. Some publishers only offer the CC BY licence, but if you are given a choice this is the licence we recommend,as it is usually mandated by funders and allows most reuse.
Follow the instructions provided by the journal to proceed to open access publication.
The Journal I Want to Publish in isn’t Covered by an Agreement
If the journal in which you want to publish is not covered by one of our agreements:
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Check if they are a subscription journal or if they are fully open access.
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If they require a fee to publish, and you don’t have access to funds, you will need to choose a different title.
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If they are a subscription journal, then you take the green route to open access and include the Rights Retention statement with your submission, to let the journal know that you will deposit a copy of any arising accepted manuscript in your institutional repository (Pure/AURA) on publication under a Creative Commons licence. “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)* licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.” *[or other appropriate open licence]
I Still Have Questions…
Contact the Open Research Team or visit our webpages.
