16.12.22: Problems for renegotiations between Sikt and several large journal publishers

An agreement on conditions has not yet been met for publishing deals between Sikt and the publishers Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SpringerNature and Sage. This can lead to agreements being discontinued from January 1^st 2023.

Access-to-read will likely be upheld for a short period in 2023, while access-to-publish (as part of agreement) will be stopped from January 1^st 2023.

The background for the problems is that received offers from publishers are not in line with guidelines from Universities Norway (UHR) and Abelia (the business association of Norwegian knowledge and technology based enterprises). The most important demands are:

• There must be no limit on the amount of articles than can be published with open access
• The cost for agreements must be reduced

Renegotiations have been in process since spring 2022, and it has become clear that publishers are not willing to meet these terms. Sikt has announced that, unless better offers are received, there will be no agreements for 2023.

See also article in Khrono (13.12.22 – in Norwegian).

Selected journals, titles published by various academic societies in particular, are not covered by the agreements.

Some agreements only cover hybrid journals (subscription journals with an open access option), others also cover gold journals (fully open access journals) - see table. Expenses beyond APC, such as extra pages, colour illustrations and copy editing, must be covered by the author/department.

The easiest way to check if a journal is included in an agreement, is to consult OpenScience. There you can check the publisher's title list. Keep in mind that OpenScience shows more agreements than NMBU currently takes part in.

Use Journal Checker Tool to see if a journal is compliant with cOAlitionS (PlanS).

Be aware that some agreements operate with publishing quotas. Once a quota is met, the agreement will be paused for the remainder of the year.

To publish cost free under one of the agreements, the following terms generally apply:

• Corresponding author must be affiliated with NMBU and choose the correct affiliation while submitting a manuscript
• Open publication must be chosen upon submission (e.g. Elsevier) or after a manuscript has been accepted (e.g. Wiley)
• Publications will have open licenses for reuse and distribution, mainly CC-BY

Overview of agreements: