Jisc Collections And Open Access Key To Collaborate On UK Gold OA Article Payments Pilot

Jisc Collections, the UK academic community’s shared service for content licensing and administration, has entered into an agreement with Open Access Key (OAK), the online payment platform for open access publishing, to run a 12 month pilot project, Jisc APC, to test its role in managing and processing Gold OA article payment charges made by its member institutions.

Lorraine Estelle, CEO of Jisc Collections said: “We are very pleased to be partnering with OAK which will test the efficiencies that a trusted third party can bring to the processing of Gold OA payments for both institutions and publishers. We hope that this extension of our established activity in the area of subscription-based resources will help all relevant stakeholders move forward during this transition phase in scholarly publishing.”

The new Jisc APC service will seek to reduce the administrative burden on the various parties involved in making an article available. The combined offering brings together OAK’s innovation in this new area and the trusted status of Jisc Collections in processing and managing payments on behalf of UK institutions and publishers.  An invitation to participate will shortly be issued by Jisc Collections to UK Institutions interested in joining the project. Discussions with publishers will commence at the same time. The pilot will be overseen by a Steering Group comprising stakeholders and funders from across the education and research sector.

Simon Thomson, CEO of Open Access Key said: “Jisc Collections has shown tremendous initiative with this project to provide leadership and structure for the academic and publishing community following the Finch Report recommendations. We in turn are delighted that OAK has been selected to provide the financial and administrative workflow platform. We have worked closely with individual academics, universities, research funders and publishers to create a time and cost efficient service with user friendly functionality. We are excited to continue this development working for Jisc Collections and the stakeholders in the project.” 

The pilot commences officially on 2 April 2013 and is in response to the publication of the Finch Report in the UK and the subsequent announcements from RCUK.  The report recommended a balanced programme of action to enable more people to read and use the publications arising from research, and to accelerate the progress towards a fully open access environment. The report also made a clear policy direction towards the support for Gold OA publishing in the UK, where publishers receive their revenues from authors rather than readers, and so research articles become freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication.

To find out more please contact Paul Harwood, Jisc Collections deputy CEO on [email protected].