Call to Commitment: Future-proof OA Publishing

In March 2024, during the Open Science Retreat in Schoorl, NL, participants came together to discuss a new ‘Narrative for sustainable Open Access’. This resulted in the following Call to Commitment, which can be endorsed by those interested in the future of Open Access in the Netherlands. If you want to add your name as well, please fill in the form below.

Call to Commitment: A future-proof approach to Open Access Publishing in the Netherlands

There is a growing awareness of the ways in which transformative¹ agreements between the Dutch Universities and academic publishing companies fail to increase the sovereignty of researchers at Dutch Universities² and equitable access to scientific research outputs³. The current Dutch strategy, focused on Open Access (OA) that is for-profit APC⁴-driven, has been unable to pursue community-driven publishing strategies. Therefore, we call for an alternative publishing strategy based on community values and Open Science (OS) principles.

In early 2022, the UKB consortium⁵ renewed a number of ‘read and publish’ contracts with key publishers that were initially established in 2015. In the coming period, a lot of these contracts are to be renegotiated and renewed⁶. 

We, the undersigned, urge our respective institutions and national stakeholders, when negotiating the renewal of these contracts, to uphold the community values and OS principles to which they have previously committed themselves^{7, 8}. Preferably, these values and principles are the premise of guidelines for OA negotiations, as is becoming more prevalent in Europe and beyond⁹. 

Only when we put these values and principles at the forefront, can we foster a system of knowledge creation, dissemination and (re)use that is inclusive, equitable and transparent, thereby strengthening our international reputation, financial sustainability, and institutional sovereignty.

For us, this entails moving away from a mere focus on for-profit and non-inclusive models, towards a landscape that fully includes institute- and community-driven OA. 

To provide these alternatives with a fair chance to demonstrate their potential, it is crucial to redirect a significant portion of the investments—currently allocated to transformative agreements—toward open source institutional repositories, diamond platforms, preprint servers, innovations in community peer reviewing, and thematic curation that allows relevant audiences to easily access our research outputs.

Investing in these solutions will bring the Dutch research environment towards a future driven by the values that we uphold.

Signatories

(Images can be used without mention to promote the Call to Commitment Petition)

1. Transformative agreements are those contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers that aimed to transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing ↩︎
2. Safeguarding Dutch Universities Against Big Tech Dominance: Risks and Mitigations https://communities.surf.nl/files/Artikel/download/Safeguarding_Dutch_Universities_Against_Big_Tech_Dominance_0.pdf ↩︎
3. See eg. cOAlitionS Towards Responsible publishing https://www.coalition-s.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Towards_Responsible_Publishing_web.pdf and UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science https://doi.org/10.54677/MNMH8546 ↩︎
4. APC stands for Article Processing Charge. Also known as a publication fee, it is a fee charged to authors to publish their articles open access. Some journals charge APCs that only cover the real costs of publishing. However, most of the publishers in the current transformative deals charge higher APCs, that also cover (large) profit margins. Therefore, APCs can range from 300 euros to over 10.000 euros for some prestige journals. ↩︎
5. The UKB Consortium is a partnership of the Dutch University Libraries and the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) ↩︎
6. List of Publishers Deals in NL https://www.openaccess.nl/en/in-the-netherlands/publisher-deals ↩︎
7. See the National Covenant Open Science NL https://www.nwo.nl/en/news/regieorgaan-open-science-officially-launched-open-science-nl and the NPOS Ambition Document https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7433767 ↩︎
8. UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science https://doi.org/10.54677/MNMH8546 ↩︎
9. Like for instance the Swiss Universities https://www.swissuniversities.ch/fileadmin/swissuniversities/Dokumente/Hochschulpolitik/Open_Science/PgB_OpenScience_-_Implementation_Phase_A_2021-2024_v6.4.pdf ,Sweden https://suhf.se/app/uploads/2023/10/Charting-Swedens-path-beyond-transformative-agreements-%E2%80%93-analysis-and-proposals-for-strategic-direction-October-2023.pdf and MIT https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ ↩︎