The Open Access strategy, from its start in 2017, had the objective of making all publicly financed publications available via Open Access by 2024. The Board passed the Open Access action plan at its meeting on 17 December 2017 and arranged for a big-deals negotiation team to be set up. Following the successful conclusion of negotiations with the three major publishing houses Elsevier (contract term 2020-2023), Springer Nature (contract term 2020-2022), and Wiley (contract term 2021-2024), swissuniversities has implemented the Read & Publish model with the three biggest publishing houses. This model grants reading access to academic periodicals and also covers Open Access publications. Under the ‘Read & Publish’ model, the participating universities and libraries finance the publication costs and pay a fixed price for reading and downloading published articles and works. This replaces traditional subscriptions, where prices vary between individual specialist periodicals.
The experiences from the first round of negotiations have been analysed. A project group from the Open Science Delegation formulated the objectives for a second round of big-deal negotiations based on the results. On 3 February 2022, the plenary assembly of swissuniversities approved the updated negotiation mandate, which ties in with the previous negotiation objectives.
The President of the negotiation delegation is Prof. Yves Flückiger, who is the President of swissuniversities and Rector of the University of Geneva. The other members are Prof. Jean-Marc Piveteau, President of the Open Science Delegation and Rector of ZHAW, Prof. Matthias Egger, President of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and Prof. Michel O. Hengartner, President of the ETH Board. The researchers are represented by Prof. Marc Robinson-Rechavi, who is Professor for Bioinformatics at the University of Lausanne. From now on, directors and experts from university libraries are responsible for coordination and the ongoing process via the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries.
Please find further information on publishing negotiations on the swissuniversities website.
Contact: Josefa Haas, Head of Communications
communications@clutterswissuniversities.ch, +41 31 335 07 34