Updates on accessibility

That’s right. ‘Big deal’ contracts were entered into with OUP in 2015 and 2016. Unfortunately, these did not include an Open Access component. Now, in 2017, renewal of the existing contracts without an Open Access component is no longer an option.

The key principle in the universities’ negotiations with publishers is that agreements made should facilitate the transition to Open Access – freely accessible academic articles – without Dutch scholars being required to pay double (double dipping) for this.

Open Access publications are easier to find, are cited more frequently and reach a larger audience. Open Access benefits not just the academic community, but also the economy and society at large.

OUP has made a proposal to the universities in the Netherlands that does not include an offer for affordable Open Access. Compared to the agreements the VSNU has made with other publishers, OUP’s proposal is a step back instead of a step forward towards achieving the goal of 100% Open Access by 2020.

As long as no agreement is in place, academics will have to use alternative routes to access any articles they require published by OUP from 1 May 2017 onwards. The articles published by OUP prior to this date can be accessed through the regular channels.

Publication in OUP journals can continue as before. If an academic wishes to publish Open Access in a journal published by OUP, an APC will have to be paid for this. They will have to pay for this themselves, unless explicit agreements to the contrary have been made.

The outcome of this negotiation pertains to the ‘big deal’ negotiations. Some universities also have specific agreements regarding certain OUP journals not covered by the ‘big deal’ negotiations. These agreements will remain in place for the duration of the respective contracts.

In principle, there will be no changes to your position or responsibilities – you can continue carrying out this work as before should you so desire. We do, however, ask that you urge OUP to facilitate Open Access publication without any additional costs.

As a researcher, you can make a conscious decision to publish in a different journal, one that does make it possible to publish Open Access without any additional costs.

An overview of journal titles with a nationwide Open Access discount is available on the UM Online Library Open Access webpage and choose then the ‘UKB OA journal browser’ (green button).

The VSNU is happy to resume negotiations if OUP is willing to make fair and more ambitious agreements relating to Open Acess.

ResearchGate, Academia and Mendeley are social networking sites for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. Please keep in mind the copyright-rules of these networks.

Unpaywall is a free web-browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that hunts for papers in more than 5,000 repositories worldwide, including preprint servers and institutional databases.

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Open Access Button is a web bookmarklet  that offers free legal research articles and data delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors.

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Kopernio is a browser plugin that finds the best available PDF of academic articles while you browse. Behind the scenes, Kopernio will search open databases and (where possible) your university’s subscriptions.

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a is a multi-disciplinary search engine to academic web resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. BASE facilitates effective and targeted searches and retrieves high quality, academically relevant results. Other than search engines like Google or Bing BASE searches the deep web as well. The sources which are included in BASE are selected and reviewed.

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OAPEN is an initiative in Open Access publishing for peer reviewed academic books in the humanities and social sciences.

Many institutional repositories contain author versions / pre-prints of scientific articles. Examples:

• UM Research Publications 
• NARCIS, the gateway to scholarly information in the Netherlands 
• The Directory of Open Access Repositories 
• Digital Commons Network 
• RePEc, a decentralised bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, etc. in the field of economics 
• SSRN encourages the early distribution of Social Sciences research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and full text papers from scholars around the world

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

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You can request copies of articles via the UM Library Interlibrary loan service. 

Search for the author’s email / address and ask for a copy of the article.