Place Controls Announced: “The UK Wiley Read and Publish Agreement – Nine Months On “

From a JISC Blog Post:

The transitional Wiley agreement is the most extensive UK open access agreement to date and is showing an encouraging appetite for open access publishing. We will be publishing further detail and supporting data on the Wiley read and publish agreement in the next week.

[Emphasis Ours] In the meantime, we wanted to share our thoughts and talk more about the decision to put in place controls on articles being published OA from mid-October and our plans for 2021.

The agreement has delivered what it set out to do; rapidly increasing the volume of OA from the UK, reducing expenditure and funding this transition using money previously spent on subscriptions. As of 31 August, 5,164 articles have been published or accepted as open access – an 82% increase on articles published OA in 2019 and a 91% increase over 2018.

Just 3% of eligible authors opted out of open access, resulting in a 97% uptake so far, which was higher than anticipated and higher than we have seen in other transitional agreements.  We also saw a sharp increase in publishing over lockdown; in April and May an average of 770 articles were published each month, over double the average number of articles (300) published in other months.

One of the challenges of the agreement is that it does not automatically cover 100% of UK output. Working with institutions and Wiley, we put safeguards in place to ensure that institutions could control spend but still comply with UK research funder policies.

One of these safeguards is to ensure that research funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) and the Wellcome Trust can be published open access. This will begin in mid-October and will use the remaining OA fund. We do not anticipate needing to make further restrictions before the end of the year – there is in excess of £2.3m in the fund alongside institutional credits. Jisc and Wiley will continue to monitor the fund very closely and unspent funds will be carried over to 2021.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

See Also: UK: JISC and Wiley Announce a 4-Year Read and Publish Agreement (March 3, 2020)

Filed under: Data Files, Funding, News, Open Access, Publishing