Open Access

Free access and without economic barriers

The movement of Open Access (OA) is based on the idea that publicly-funded research results should be put in the public domain in order to strengthen science and the knowledge-based economy. The movement advocates permanent, free and unrestricted access to research content in order to promote its accessibility and impact for the benefit of science and society. 

The benefits of Open Access 

• More research visibility. 
• Greater impact on publications (author and publications have more citations).
• Institutions increase their visibility. 
• Permanent access. 
• Easy retrieval of contents. 
• OA guarantees the preservation of research outcomes. 

There are mainly two ways of publishing open access: 

• The green route, or when publications are deposited in a repository.   
• The golden route, or when publications are in open access journals. 

Open Access in Catalonia and CSUC

The Interuniversitary Council of Catalonia (CIC) agreed on 2010 on a framework document that gave the guidelines to ease the process for Catalan universities of approving their open access institutional policies. 

In front of the growing requirements of funding institutions to publish in OA, Catalan universities developed best practices and a guide of recommendations for research staff to meet the requirements when disseminating open access publications resulting from research projects within the Spanish Science Law and the Horizon 2020 of the European Union. 

The Functional Commission of the Open Science Area has been agreeing on measures in favor of the OA that are based on: 

• Gradually change the model from pay to read to pay to publish. 
• Contain the cost of the scientific communication system. 
• Deposit academic research into institutional repositories.
• Encourage transparency. 

The CSUC Research Support Group has developed an infographic with widgets, resources and services that can be useful for locating open access versions of articles in the event that a resource is cancelled. 

In May 2018 CSUC signed a statement from the Southern European Libraries Link (SELL), an association formed by a group of consortia libraries from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Israel. This statement is based on the premise that the money spent today in the publishing system is enough to make a transition from the current system to one with Open Access. 

Transformative agreements

CSUC participates and supports the CRUE Commission on the negotiation of the Transformative agreements with several publishers of reference.

As is being done in other European countries, it is intended that former subscription licenses are repurposed to support open access in those articles that have as a main author a researcher from one of the institutions included in the agreement.

To find out further details on these agreements, available from 2021, and the information needed for researchers who want to publish in open access, have a look in the following files (in Catalan):

• Transformative agreement ScienceDirect (Elsevier) 
• Transformative agreement SpringerNature Journals
• Transformative agreement Wiley Online Library
• Transformative agreement American Chemical Society (ACS)
• Transformative agreement American Institute of Physics (AIP)
• Transformative agreement IEEE Xplore
• Transformative agreement Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
• Transformative agreement Emerald
• Transformative agreement ACM Digital Library

Since 2018, the charges for open access publishing (APC fees) have been monitored in the universities of Catalonia to have information on the cost of scientific communication. That is, to have real data on the charges for paying to read and paying to publish. OA monitoring provides the following data:

• The expenditure for open publishing has increased since 2019. Nevertheless, 2022 marked a trend reversal with a total cost of €2,665,241, which is about 14.14% less than 2021.
• APC expenses account for 22.15% of the total expenditure of universities on journal subscriptions (€12,029,994.4). This expense must be considered as additional to that amount already paid for subscriptions. The two expenses -APC and journal subscriptions- represent the cost of scientific communication by universities.
• Grouping the expenses for open publishing by APC taxes and the taxes of the transformative agreements for open publishing, the total OA expenditure accounts for €6,687,828, of which 39.85% (€2,665,214) is open publishing.
• The overall expenditure in 2022 for scientific communication is €14,695,209, divided into 45.51% (€6,687,828) for open publishing, and 54,48% (€8,007,380) for journal subscriptions.

Institutional Policies

Catalan universities have the following institutional policies for Open Access:

• Política d'accés obert de la Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
• Política institucional d'accés obert de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
• Política institucional d'Accés Obert: accés, visibilitat, impacte i preservació de la producció acadèmica de la UPC a Internet (UPC)
• Política institucional de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra per fomentar l'accés obert a la producció científica (UPF)
• Mandat institucional d'accés obert de la Universitat de Girona (UdG)
• Política institucional d'accés obert de la Universitat de Lleida (UdL)
• Mandat per fomentar l'accés obert a la URV (URV)
• Política institucional d'accés obert per a les dades de recerca de la URV (URV)
• Política institucional de coneixement obert (UOC)
• Política institucional de la Universitat de Vic per fomentar l'accés obert (UVic-UCC)
• Foment de l'accés obert a la Universitat Ramon Llull (URL)
• Declaració institucional a favor de la promoció de l'accés obert a la Universitat Jaume I (UJI)