“Green OA: Publishers and Journals Allowing Zero Embargo and CC-BY”

From an Innovations in Scholarly Communications Blog Post by Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, Utrecht University (July 2020):

We witness increased interest in the role of green open access and how it can contribute to the goals of open science. This interest focuses on immediacy (reducing or eliminating embargoes) and usage rights (through open licenses), as these can contribute to wider and faster dissemination, reuse and collaboration in science and scholarship. 

On July 15 2020, cOAlition S announced their Rights Retention Strategy, providing authors with the right to share the accepted manuscript (AAM) of their research articles with an open license and without embargo, as one of the ways to comply with Plan S requirements. This raises the question to what extent immediate and open licensed self archiving of scholarly publications is currently already possible and practiced. Here we provide the results of some analyses carried out earlier this year, intended to at least partially answer that question. We limit this brief study to journal articles and only looked at CC-BY licenses (not CC0, CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-ND, which can also meet Plan S requirements).

[Clip]

Our main conclusions are that:

1. Based on stated policies we found very few (18) journals that currently allow the combination of immediate and CC-BY-licensed self archiving.
2. Based on stated policies of 36 large publishers, there are currently ~2800 journals with those publishers that allow immediate green, but all disallow or do not explicitly allow CC-BY.

Learn More, Read the Complete Article and Spreadsheet (approx. 1480)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Journal Articles, News, Open Access, Scholarly Communications