JISC Wiley deal amendments
Back in April we promoted the new Wiley Read and Publish agreement, negotiated by JISC on behalf of UK academic institutions – https://openresearch.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2020/04/jisc-strikes-deal-with-wiley.html
The deal grants corresponding authors at participating institutions Gold open access at no additional cost. This is because the Gold open access payments are paid for in advance by institutions as part of the overall ‘read and publish’ fee.
This groundbreaking agreement will enable institutions to control the costs of access and OA publishing. It will also support a simplified process for authors and their institutions, enabling compliance with funder mandates and Plan S. (JISC https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/jisc-uk-institutions-and-wiley-agree-ground-breaking-deal-02-feb-2020)
One important aspect of the deal is that it is ‘capped’. This means that open access will be offered on a ‘first come first served’ basis, and at some point in the year the national ‘pot’ for article processing charges (APCs) will run out. JISC and Wiley estimated that the pot would cover 85% of content published by participating UK institutions. However, take up of the deal has happened much quicker than JISC expected and subsequently the pot is running out a lot sooner than anticipated. Therefore, in order to ensure the pot lasts longer, the decision was taken to limit the open access deal to original research and review articles only. This new restriction took effect on June 10th.
Further restrictions may be introduced later in the year if it appears that restricting to research and reviews article isn’t enough to make the pot stretch. If further restrictions are required the most likely solution will be to limit to UKRI or COAF funded research. This is because these funders often require authors to pay for Gold open access, so JISC are looking to avoid any additional institutional spending. If any further restrictions do come into effect we will let you know in another follow-up blog post.
If you have any questions do let us know, and if you would like to find out about other current membership deals we have in place take a look at the memberships webpage.