2018 Charleston Library Conference

Open access dissemination allows unrestricted and paywall-free access to scientific publications and is endorsed by a growing number of institutions and countries worldwide. In Europe, unified non-renewal of major publishers and public calls for change happen frequently whereas in North America, a dispersed purchasing landscape and private fee structure create barriers to mass support for OA negotiations. The financial viability of OA publishing differs radically across disciplines where APCs may or may not be an acceptable model. With OA cost models still in their infancy, this session explores three international partnerships making their way in the OA landscape.
OA2020 is an international initiative to advance OA by transforming scholarly publishing from its current subscription system to OA publishing. A growing number of US libraries have signed the OA2020 Expression of Interest. The first two presenters provide an overview of OA2020, its progress to date, and perspectives from their signatory institutions in gaining stakeholder support for repurposing subscription funds to support open access. The third presenter discusses how their OA2020 university library has collaborated with another US institution and two in Norway to build a new OA publishing platform: Vega, that offers structured-text authoring with multimedia capabilities, visual and flexible EDP workflows including open peer review, and a customizable reader front-end, making the possibility of more OA, media-rich, and interdisciplinary publishing a viable reality. Finally, the fourth speaker presents Érudit (erudit.org), a longstanding Canadian national research facility and publishing platform that has reworked its subscription-based dissemination model into an open-access partnership with the Canadian Knowledge Research Network (CRKN), which represents Canadian research libraries. Érudit offers aggregation services and financial support to over 140 HSS Canadian scholarly journals, published in French and English (97% already in OA). These four OA presenters will share successes and challenges in their goal towards fully OA publishing models.