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Open Access
Scholarly Communication Librarian
UTSA Support for Open Access
UTSA Libraries actively supports researchers who make their scholarship available without a paywall through open access journals, books, and more. We proactively seek partnerships with publishers that will reduce open access costs for authors, including discounts or waivers on Article Processing Charges (APCs). UTSA does not have an open access mandate for faculty at this time.
UTSA Memberships and Publisher Open Access Agreements
UTSA Libraries continuously seeks partnerships with organizations and publishers to reduce costs and provide value for our researchers. Below is a list of our current memberships and open access agreements with publishers. For more information on the benefits of a specific membership, reach out to your subject librarian.
Publisher and Open Access Agreements
The library does not currently fund Article Processing Charges (APCs) but encourages UTSA researchers to take advantage of these APC discounts we have negotiated with publishers.
| Publisher | Discount |
|---|---|
| ACM Open (Association for Computing Machinery) | APCs waived at 100% |
| BioMed Central | 15% discount on APCs |
| Cambridge University Press | APCs waived at 100% |
| Elsevier | 10% or 15% discount on APCs, depending on the journal |
| IOP (Institute of Physics) | APCs waived at 100% |
| MDPI | 10% discount on APCs |
| Sage | APCs waived at 100% |
| Springer Open | 15% discount on APCs |
Memberships
- Annual Reviews Subscribe to Open (S2O)S2O is a membership program that allows conversion of subscription-based Annual Review titles to Open Access. Existing institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals. With sufficient support, every new volume is immediately converted to OA under a Creative Commons license and is available for everyone to read and re-use. In addition, all articles from the most recent nine volumes are also accessible to all. If support is insufficient, the paywall is retained.
- HathiTrustHathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
- Knowledge UnlatchedKnowledge Unlatched is an Open Access service provider registered as a for-profit GmbH in Berlin, Germany. It offers a crowdfunding model to support a variety of Open Access book and journal content packages as well as the financial funding of partnerships.
- MIT Press' Direct to Open ProgramDirect to Open harnesses collective action to support open access to MIT scholarship. Libraries contribute funding towards making all new MIT Press scholarly monographs open access and in return receive access to additional materials.
- ORCID
(Open Researcher and Contributor ID) (‘or-kid) is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of persistent unique digital identifiers which are linked to researchers' scholarly and grant activities. - PhilPapers.orgPhilpapers is an online research hub in philosophy that contains a publication index and open access archive.
- SCOAP3Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. SCOAP3 is a one-of-its-kind partnership of over three thousand libraries, key funding agencies and research centers in 44 countries and 3 intergovernmental organisations. Working with leading publishers, SCOAP3 has converted key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access at no cost for authors.
- Texas Digital LibraryThe Texas Digital Library is a consortium of Texas higher education institutions that builds capacity for preserving, managing, and providing access to unique digital collections of enduring value.
- TRAILThe Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports. TRAIL currently consists of over four dozen member institutions whose annual membership fees and volunteered staff time further the efforts of the project. View digitized content at: http://www.technicalreports.org/
- University of Michigan's Fund to Mission ProgramThe Fund to Mission program's goal is to convert University of Michigan Press new scholarly monographs to open access by 2023. Libraries contribute funding in return for access to additional titles.
What are Transformative Agreements?
Transformative agreements are those contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers that transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, moving from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services. (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges, ESAC)
Transformative agreements can also be known as "read-and-publish" or "publish-and-read" deals. The exact terms of the agreements vary depending on the institution and publisher, though they tend to focus on the following principles: (Transformative Agreements: A Primer)
- Costs- Libraries seek to shift from paying for subscriptions to paying for publishing and to reduce unsustainable price increases for subscriptions
- Copyright- Transformative agreements often require that authors maintain their copyright instead of transferring it to the publisher. This is often accomplished by applying a Creative Commons license to the work
- Transparency- Organizations often insist that the terms of any such transformative agreement be made publicly available, though this is often just the key components of the deal and not the entire agreement
- Transitional- By definition, transformative agreements are transitional in that their goal is a permanent shift to open access and the end of subscription-based publishing
More Resources
- ESAC Transformative Agreements RegistryA frequently updated registry of transformative agreements with publishers. The Efficiency and Standards for [Open Access] Article Charges initiative was established in 2014 in order to keep up the discussion about open access workflows.
- Transformative Agreements: A PrimerA basic primer from The Scholarly Kitchen on transformative agreements and their characteristics and components.