Background
Universities close a deal on Open Access
University umbrella organisation VSNU and academic publisher Springer have reached an agreement on Open Access.
Wednesday 3 December 2014

Academics publish the results of their research in academic journals, which are digitally accessible – but not to everyone. Regular people are confronted with a pay wall and universities pay millions for access to papers that have often been written by their own staff.

The Dutch universities and the Ministry of Education are not happy with the situation: published work should be Open Access so that everyone can read them, free of charge. The publishers should acquire their money from the costs of publication instead of from the sales of papers and subscriptions. The transfer to Open Access is a major issue in the negotiations between the universities and the publishers – the “Big Deals” – this year.

Previously, the Big Deal between the publisher Elsevier and the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) broke down, but as the talks with Springer went well, next year, the Springer journals – and there are over two thousand of them – will be accessible to university staff. Springer will also actively support the Ministry of Education’s proposal to offer all published academic work funded by the Dutch taxpayers to the public.

“The talks with Springer reveal that it is possible to make that decisive shift towards Open Access”, VSNU announced happily in the press release. The State Secretary for Science, Sander Dekker, is pleased too and is talking about steps in the right direction: “It’s important that the major publishing houses realise that Open Access is the future of academic publications”.

Meanwhile, the Big Deal with Elsevier is going nowhere.

But there’s more good news for supporters of Open Access: from 2017 onwards, all academic research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be published immediately in Open Access journals. Delayed Open Access, as offered by Nature and Science, is not regarded as good enough anymore.

The foundation will pay the additional costs involved. The NWO, a Dutch research backer, will introduce similar arrangements for its subsidies in 2015.

The Gates Foundation spends approximately 724 million Euros on its health programmes, most of which goes to scientific research. BB