Jisc Announces the Launch of a “New Approach to Supporting Scholarly Communications”: The Open Access Community Framework (OACF)

From a JISC Blog Post:

To further realise Jisc and its strategic groups’ commitment to working with stakeholders across the scholarly communication landscape and supporting innovation, we’re now announcing a new approach to supporting publishers or initiatives operating under the diamond OA model – open access publishing with no subscription or author facing fees –  with the open access community framework (OACF).

Jisc has worked with a range of subscription and fully OA publishers so far, negotiating agreements based on a variety of models, including read and publish, subscribe to open, funder-compliant green, to help all publishers wishing to engage with OA. We also have several agreements for OA monographs and agreements supporting core scholarly communications infrastructure, such as arXiv.

How Does the OACF Work?

Jisc will publish a call directed to mission-based and diamond publishers to submit an application providing detailed information about their journal/initiative and an annual UK HE funding target by a submission deadline date.

Jisc will then check submissions against sector quality standards and will work with approved publishers to arrive at institutional contribution levels (Jisc bands). To ensure full transparency, applications for all OACF participants will be published on Jisc’s website.

We’ll announce participants in late April and open catalogue pages in licence subscriptions manager, Jisc’s ordering system, so that members can see details of funding options and pledge support. The funding window will remain open until October.

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A Community Funding approach

As the diamond OA model charges neither subscription nor author-facing publishing fees, publishers rely on community funding to support their operating costs and provide opportunities to authors for whom article processing charges are a barrier to OA publishing.

In consultation with our strategic groups, we’ve developed the OACF to help small publishers reach a wider potential support group and to help institutions understand when funding requests will be made so they can plan budgets accordingly.

Although library budgets are under increasing pressure, we’re aware that many institutions believe they have a role in supporting diamond OA and mission-driven initiatives and are considering how to direct budgets to do so.

Learn More, Read the Complete Post

See Also: JISC OA Services Page (Includes Link to OACF Model License)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing, Scholarly Communications