International Trends Toward Open Access

In March 2020, the European Commission awarded a contract for the creation of a new, Open Access (OA) publishing platform for scientific articles. The European Commission’s Online Manual Funding Tenders Opportunities, a searchable resources website which launched in 2021, continues a continent-wide trend in scholarly publishing: a movement towards open, freely accessible models of online publishing. The portal compiles organizations that have worked towards open solutions or have been awarded Horizon 2020—a research and innovation program for European researchers and organizations, now succeeded by Horizon Europe. One tenet of both Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe is a mandatory OA policy, which represents the growing trend toward open publishing across Europe, and promises to deliver many more open projects to be funded via partnerships.

The European University Association published a report in December 2021 on the results of the Open Science Survey (Saenen et al. 2021), conducted across 2020 and 2021; the report illustrates the direction and growth of open access in Europe. And the OA2020 initiative “estimates that roughly 85% of new research articles published globally still appear in journals behind paywalls” (“Open Access 2020 Executive Summary” 2020, 1); this does not necessarily exclude hybrid articles.

In addition to Horizon Europe, cOAlition S, a consortium of research institutes across Europe advocating for open publishing practices, launched Plan S in September 2018, with the following mission:

With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo (Plan S, n.d.).

Supported by Science Europe and the European Commission, Plan S has started to have an impact in the science community.

In February 2023, the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU) stated that research papers should be made freely available under open licenses as a standard for European research (Silver 2023). Citing the high costs of publishing and subscription, lawmakers are noting the growing frustration with traditional publishing, and noting the changing culture around publishing. A draft text published by the same office outlined the imperative of OA research in contributing to high-quality research, and encouraged member states to establish new standards for OA publishing “as soon as possible” (Silver 2023).

By May 2023, the European Commission was calling for more robust OA for research projects funded by state institutions. An “Outcome of Proceedings” document entitled “High-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing,” written by the Council of the European Union, did not mince words in terms of the Council’s expectations for a more equitable, accessible model of publishing, insisting “that immediate and unrestricted open access should be the norm in publishing research involving public funds, with transparent pricing commensurate with the publication services and where costs are not covered by individual authors or readers” (Council of the EU 2023, 3). And the drumbeat for open science continues to grow louder across Europe as more researchers and authors begin to see publication in OA journals and forums as a legitimate way to impact discourse in a given field.

More recently, cOAlition-S published “Towards Responsible Publishing: A proposal from cOAlition S.” (cOAlition S 2023), identifying common problems in the industry—delays in research output, inequitable models for determining what is published, outdated methods for peer review, and more—pointing to a set of models that could be scholar-led, questioning the role of large publishers that depend on embargoes and high fees in order to sustain or defend their profitability.

As more research institutions begin to adopt OA policies, open repositories become useful places to gather materials, explore further citations, and continue to produce open content, which, as a consequence of being open, is made fully available upon acceptance. At the beginning of 2010, 14 research institutions across Germany had OA policies in place; by September 2022, there were 78 such policies. Between 2010 and 2019, OA policies in the United Kingdom grew from 47 to 120. And by 2017, there were 22 Ukrainian institutions with OA policies, compared to three in 2010. Across Europe, such increases have led to a broader acceptance of sources from the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP). See the Open Access publishers included in the registry (ROARMAP, n.d.).

In the US, the University of California system forced Elsevier into a more favorable, open deal; see “UC’s Deal with Elsevier: What It Took, What It Means, Why It Matters” (Kell 2021). Additionally, colleges and universities are declining to renew big deals in favor of more efficiently piecing together collections, with an eye towards including more open methods of publishing. With global pressure continuing to mount for publishers to make more publicly funded research available open access, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release in August 2022 titled “OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay” (White House 2022), echoing the sentiments of cOAlition-S and Plan-S, though its guidelines are not mandated. While it is not entirely clear what this will mean for the balance of OA publications, it is indicative of the direction in which states and governments are moving as more institutions expect to access publicly funded content in an open capacity.

In August 2020, SPARC Europe launched a two-and-a-half year program to grow infrastructure for Open Educational Resources (OERs), culminating in the European Network of Open Education Librarians. This network currently includes 110 members from 27 countries, and conducts surveys from participating libraries on their involvement in and aspirations in developing OERs across disciplines. See the Handbook chapter “Open Educational Resources in Europe: Current Opportunities and Future Potential” for more information on OERs.

Looking again at the results of the European University Association’s survey results, “A Closer Look at Open Access to research publications in European universities” (Morais, Berghmans, and Gaillard 2022), it becomes clear that the next three to five years may be a pivotal time for the growth of OA publishing in Europe. Of those universities with a specific target for the percentage of articles that would be published open access, 76% set that target between 2021 and 2025 (Morais, Berghmans, and Gaillard 2022, 7).

Big Deal Cancellation

A Focus on the UK

Depending on budget constraints, priorities, and disciplinary needs, planning for implementation of OA programs is different for every institution. Some universities and university librarians have formed consortia as a means of crowdsourcing and sharing resources. In 2021, Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee), representing more than 150 universities in the UK, announced a two-year transformational partnership with the National Academy of Sciences in the US. Part of a common, growing trend for many universities and consortia, this “Read and Publish” partnership allows free access to scholarly content and reduction or removal of article processing charges for consortial authors. Jisc consortia members have full access to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences articles dating back to 1915, and are able to submit OA articles to the journal without incurring any article processing charges.

Transformative OA agreements like these are becoming more popular as institutions, faculty, and scholars expect to be able to access their content without having to incur fees for reading or publishing open access, and as major institutions are forcing publishers to the table, negotiating large deals that, while they may not be fully open access, provide an experience for university or consortia members that is essentially a modeled, smaller-scale open access.

The Springer Nature Open Access Agreements website continues to announce deals with consortia across several countries, getting ahead of the trend in OA publishing to ensure revenue streams from each large contract, while enabling universities across Western Europe and the US to provide their students and faculty “free” access to content and reduced or removed article processing charges. While Springer has “Transformative agreements” with institutions across Europe, including Finland, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, it maintains “Fully Open Access agreements” (Springer Nature, n.d.) with institutions in Sweden, Germany, and Hungary.

With fully OA agreements, authors at participating institutions can access all Springer content, and submit their scholarship to hybrid or OA Springer journals free of charge. Transformative agreements tend to have more limitations; some stipulate a limit on the total amount of coverage for article processing charges, making some authors responsible for article processing charges after the limit has been met, and some limit the types of articles covered. In the US, the University of California (UC), after going through protracted negotiations, held out for an OA contract with both Elsevier and Springer Nature. As a result, researchers affiliated with the UC network have extensive Read and Publish rights within many quality OA Springer and Elsevier publications. While this was an exceptional case with a very large system, many universities and systems with enough leverage to pressure publishers into OA deals are doing so.

A June 2021 article from Ithaka S+R, “What’s the Big Deal? How Researchers Are Navigating Changes to Journal Access” (Cooper and Rieger 2021) found that a university’s decision to cancel a “Big Deal” journal subscription with publishers like Elsevier and Springer did not heavily impact the day-to-day workflow or research of scholars at the institution. The authors discuss the impact of Big Deal cancellations on negotiations as well, reporting that some institutions, “primarily in Europe, have negotiated new deals that align with their evolving open access policies, using cancellations as part of the negotiating strategy” (Cooper and Rieger 2021, 7). All in all, the study found that “when a suite of journals is no longer available through a Big Deal subscription package, researchers experience little negative impact in the short term” (Cooper and Rieger 2021, 3.).

Between the rising subscription rates of transformative journals and the growing hesitance to continue using traditional subscription models, a sharp question is posed: where should librarians turn to help researchers and faculty discover and develop accessible scholarly material? The key work for librarians is to establish connections to repositories that are fully open access, expanding the possibilities for accessible content for research and intentionally bolstering and developing their institution’s connection to consortial repositories. And they must consistently work to familiarize faculty, researchers, and other librarians with newly emerging networks that provide access to cutting-edge scholarship at a cost significantly less than what the publishing companies provide.

A Focus on Sweden

Some Swedish universities are participating in the “fully” OA package offered by Springer Nature, but in November 2021, Wilhelm Widmark, Library Director at Stockholm University and co-chair of the Swedish Bibsam consortia (with over 80 Swedish research institutions), published an article in the UKSG eNewsletter, “Will there be any transformation or are we stuck with the transformative agreements?” (Widmark 2021). He summarized the feeling of libraries and educational institutions towards the complicated and slow-moving nature of the transformative agreement: “Swedish universities are committed to reach the goal [of a fully open access Sweden] but we don’t find the transformative agreements sustainable for the future. When Plan-S came up it stated that they should be temporary, and then recommendations were for a short transitional period” (Widmark 2021), but, he noted, many transformative agreements do not seem to have an end date, or finalized transition to fully open date, as promised. “Why should research funders or readers and libraries maintain the profit levels of large commercial organizations” (Widmark 2021), he asks-and many librarians and administrators are starting to ask the same questions.

Some countries have differing levels of access even within Springer, depending on the institutions involved. In Hungary for example, some institutions have agreed to the transformative agreement, which covers fees for publishing in Springer’s hybrid journals, while others participate in the fully open program, which allows authors to contribute free of charge to fully OA journals in BioMed Central, Palgrave, Nature Research, and SpringerOpen. Comprehensive deals leave researchers with less to worry about in terms of potential fees, but are more expensive for the institution. As more institutions look to open options and work with each other to resource and create open infrastructures, they develop more leverage when it comes to negotiating their deals with large publishers.

A Focus on Germany

While the past decade has seen an increase in OA policies in Germany in line with changes across the rest of northern and western Europe, the German model is a unique combination of consortia and non-profit agencies creating resources and an audience for OA publication. And for scholars in Germany, as well as around the world, publishing internationally—i.e., in American journals—is a top priority, which plays into the hands of the major, well-established publishers, who market their longstanding reputations as international authorities on various disciplines. To satisfy faculty and university demands, universities sign Read and Publish or OA agreements with major publishers—opening the scope of research available for scholars at affiliated universities, but also continuing a problematic tendency in publishing.

For individuals, access to Read and Publish or transformative agreements is determined by scholarly affiliation; a login to an associated university or research institution means fewer financial barriers to submission than at a university not able to sign a large contract with the likes of Elsevier or Springer. Additionally, some universities have funds set aside to cover the costs of APCs for researchers submitting from their institutions. The availability of these funds varies, and associations with universities able to sign a Read and Publish agreement or produce consistent resources for OA publication plays a significant role in whether a scholar can publish their work open access. Considering that the OA model was developed to circumvent some of those financial incongruities, this reality is less than ideal, and the reliance on large publishers to produce OA content stifles the movement for further development of open platforms.

Consider Nature’s announcement “Nature sets article processing charge at the equivalent of $11,250 for researchers selecting open-access publishing” (Seltzer 2020). While the move towards a more open model signifies a positive direction for the publishing landscape—this amount is regressive, and points to the ouroboric nature of universities making massive payments to publishers which ultimately refuse to embrace the fully open model. While funding work to be more openly available is an end many OA supporters gladly embrace, the fact that millions of dollars each year are paid in fees to large publishers points to the dependence on these publishers. It is hard to imagine where the funding and resourcing of new OA publishing platforms will come from if it’s not the money already funding OA projects, whether or not they are part of developing further open models.

A Focus on OPEN APC

The Open APC Initiative was created to monitor and aggregate data from university publishing funds worldwide. With data submitted voluntarily, for many countries the dataset is clearly incomplete. In Germany, however, with a robust effort to submit data to Open APC, the dataset tells a cautionary narrative about the nature of OA publishing, and how it is playing out for major publishers.

Of the nearly €62.5 million spent on covering OA article processing fees (including hybrid and fully open journals), €13.5 million has gone to Springer Nature journals, €2.8 million to other Springer imprints, and €2.2 million to Elsevier. Approximately €18.5 million of the €62.5 million set aside for OA publication fees has thus been paid to large publishers dependent on subscription models. And this funding comes from German institutions hoping to engage in a more radically accessible form of publishing. To put it in perspective, while these three publishers account for almost one-third of total APC expenditures in Germany, they are only three of 354 publishers that have published an OA work in Germany. It is optimistic and perhaps foolish to think that small, newer publishers are ready to handle the same load as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and so on, but as librarians, it is important that we recognize the problematic nature of big publishing companies taking in large portions of funding directed toward a new, more accessible model of publishing meant to take the burden of cost off the reader and to allow library collection budgets to free themselves from the heavy burdens of yearly subscriptions.

A Focus on Eastern Europe

While OA publishing continues to grow around the world, the ability to create or adapt new open technology depends somewhat on the number of institutions in a given network, and their ability to donate time and resources to building shared repositories or collectively building leverage when negotiating with a large publisher. Despite some of the challenges faced by universities and research institutions with smaller budgets or consortial leverage, the popularity of the new open models for publishing has been circulating and resonating worldwide, particularly within the last decade.

While the UK, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries have had a stable foundation of policies and consortia over the past decades, in Turkey the number of policies has grown rapidly, particularly in the last seven or eight years. At the end of 2013, Turkey was home to only four institutions with OA policies; by the end of 2020, there were 108. In the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Republic of Moldova, the number of OA policies has doubled since the end of 2015. With roughly 15 new policies, the number may be relatively small compared to that in other countries across Western Europe, but it shows a continuing trend in countries where even national consortia might not have enough content in repositories to threaten the large deals.

In Poland, a group of hundreds of universities formed the ICM Consortium, which has Read and Publish agreements in place with the Oxford Academic Press and IOP Publishing; this agreement allows for discounted APCs and access to Oxford and IOP content. Deals with Cambridge and Elsevier have followed, illustrating increased interest in finding ways to publish open access, even when the number of policies in the country is significantly lower than that of some western neighbors. In January 2020, the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education produced a brochure titled “Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructures” (Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, n.d.), giving ideas and examples for open projects in different areas in the sciences.

Also in Poland, the CeON repository, or the Repository of the Center for Open Sciences, receives submissions from a variety of Polish universities and can be freely accessed anywhere in the world—most easily through the CeON Aggregator, which allows a simple search to connect to over 371,500 documents in 22 repositories across Poland.

Many of these titles or submitted pre-prints may not appear in a standard university library catalog, and the prospect of cataloging a country’s worth, or a world’s worth, of OA content does not make much sense, but knowing about sources like this for submissions across different disciplines allows a librarian to enhance collections and make good suggestions to faculty, while also promoting a new method of publishing that represents a more equitable way of sharing information and research. Additionally, the CeON Repository is accessed, most easily, through their CeON Aggregator which allows a simple search to connect to over 371,500 documents in 22 repositories across Poland. Such tools can supplement collections in a way that enables librarians and universities to think about their budgets and the amounts being spent on subscription deals, and pose several questions: How much would an institution’s researchers be harmed by the cancellation of a big deal? Is it worthwhile to redirect funding towards other projects, or to join and build other shared repositories? Long term, how does an investment in an OA repository, or in developing a quality infrastructure for submitting OA content compare with returns on continuing to pay subscription costs for journal articles? And perhaps most pertinently, can a subscription be negotiated, and what leverage can be created by developing and curating new, affordable collections that can be used to work toward favorable deals with big publishing companies?

Open Science

The European Commission has a policy priority to make the scientific research it funds available in open repositories across Europe, and uses an eight-pronged approach to creating a dynamic, relevant set of open resources. Part of this approach is the creation of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) data and open data sharing as a default method for publishing the results of scientific research, development of a European Open Science Cloud as a pilot for the new European Research Area, and the establishment of career research evaluation systems that acknowledge open science activities.

The push for Open Science across the EU has led to the growth of consortial repositories and a strengthening of open networks where researchers can find resources and submit pre-prints or fully edited works. For librarians in participating countries, knowledge of networks such as the EOSC can bolster collections and help circumvent the potential loss of research through cancellation or prolonged negotiations.

Additionally, as pressure builds on publishers and institutions to make their research freely available to the public, the importance of open source industry players increases, as they are able to leverage their influence toward more open ends. In April 2023, a number of open source organizations released a letter to the EU saying that the Cyber Resilience Act could have “a chilling effect on open source software development” (Sawers 2023), and could slow the development of open source projects that now make up a large portion of new science initiatives in the EU.

It would be impossible to fully cover the scope and landscape of the development of open resources in Europe without discussing the proverbial Robin Hood of academic-and particularly scientific publishing, Sci-Hub. While no academic or professor would ever dream of officially referring to it or sending a student there for resources, the reality is that many scholars turn to streaming services when they are denied access because of a paywall or limited access. In the past few years, Elsevier has begun to seek damages for content illegally posted to the site and shared. The reality, however, is that wherever these court decisions land, scholars and researchers are turning more and more to freely accessible resources like Sci-Hub. In Russia, where Sci-Hub has its physical home, a growing network of OA materials is cited on eLIBRARY.ru, a rather basic website on which millions of scholarly articles and documents are made available. The growth of these repositories and networks shows how scholars are looking to publish their work without barriers, and how researchers are seeking cutting-edge scholarship in repositories that will not charge for downloads.

Finding Open Access Resources

As open repositories and infrastructures develop and become more popular, finding the right resources can be challenging. While the most pertinent scholarship on a subject may be freely available and accessible, this does not mean it will appear in library catalogs. With consortial efforts to create accessible repositories for OA content, many institutions and publishers have policies that allow for pre-prints to be held, open access, in university repositories. But this can depend on several different factors: Do scholars generally submit their work to open institutional repositories? Do faculty and librarians check the repositories frequently for new submissions and materials? And perhaps most importantly, is there a consistent process for creating metadata around submissions that makes it easy for prospective researchers to find them? Different universities are in different places in terms of establishing workflows for their open source materials.

The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) recently selected OAPEN (an online library and publishing platform for academic books) and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) for its second-funding cycle. While these repositories make available thousands of academic texts and open books, these resources do not necessarily flow into library catalogs, and thus need to be sought out by researchers and, in particular, librarians. Establishing common standards for metadata creation is a key step for securing and making the most of open infrastructure across a variety of institutions and disciplines. The DOAB hosts over 47,000 academic books from more than 670 publishers; all are freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

The DOAB makes its metadata readily available for searching by librarians or researchers, and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is also available directly on the website. Consistency in protocols is a crucial piece of a librarian’s ability to index in their own catalogs, and as more institutions begin to rely on open source repositories and databases, there is a growing need to establish a working set of standards.

What Librarians Can Do

Considering more findings from the EUA survey, it is clear that librarians are at the forefront of the open access movement. Among institutions preparing to implement Plan S, 78% involved library staff in the process, 57% involved administrative or technical staff, and 23% involved high-level university leadership (Morais, Berghmans, Gaillard 2022, 10). As we consider the growth of OA publications and contracts in Europe and, given the recent memorandum from the White House, librarians in the US, for better or worse, will have a large role in the upcoming battles between publishers and institutions, and in the ongoing development of open resources.

This role is dependent on librarians’ willingness to explore new repositories and set aside resources for consortial projects. Participating in local consortia and adding to repositories helps increase the viability and usefulness of open source databases. And pointing faculty towards these repositories can increase awareness of resources that might otherwise be ignored in favor of the subscription content that has worked well in the past, but has cost universities and students a great deal of money.

In 2017, David Lewis, from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, published “The 2.5% Commitment” (Lewis 2017), asking about the collective sacrifices universities can make to improve librarianship and knowledge acquisition? The commitment makes the case for the following: “Every academic library should commit to contribute 2.5% of its total budget to support the common infrastructure needed to create the open scholarly commons” (Lewis 2017, 1).

Ultimately, the array of assets available for a librarian to share with faculty or students goes beyond the individual school catalog, and providing affordable course materials can be made much easier with knowledge of freely available resources that can supplement or even replace expensive subscriptions. Additionally, as more open access content is uploaded into repositories in the sciences or broad disciplines, these repositories become more viable for other researchers, who may in turn decide to index their work in an open repository or to publish open access.

Types of Open Access: Green, Gold, and Diamond

Whether or not a university has an OA policy for all of its publications, there are a number of steps authors can take to make their work open. For better or worse, however, it is generally the responsibility of librarians to point out these open source digital spaces and explain how to work with them. Two common tiers referring to the “open” status of a piece of material are Green Open Access and Gold Open Access; most simply, the difference can be seen as open repositories versus fully open journals.

Green Open Access refers to scholarship that is in open repositories; even if it is also in a non-OA journal, some authors are allowed to submit pre-prints to institutional repositories at their universities without violating their license with the publishing journal. Gold Open Access, on the other hand, means that the final, published versions are freely available across the world for anyone with internet access. OA journals are examples of “Gold” open access. Additionally, the terms “Diamond” or “Platinum” are used to describe Gold Open Access publishers that do not charge a fee (such as an Article Processing Charge) for publication.

Universities are increasingly trying to bolster awareness of their digital repositories, and while many schools already deposit theses and dissertations into their repositories, making repository submission a common part of article publication at a given university allows researchers there to have cutting-edge access without having to wait or pay. This creates a more thriving environment for current scholarship, and increases the relevance and ultimate citations of authors whose work is now more accessible. Whether authors use their institutional repository to deposit pre-prints may vary across institutions, but librarians can play the important role of familiarizing new departments with changing methodologies in publishing and pointing out the high-quality work being made available through OA publishing.

Digital Scholarship and Scholarly Communications

The growth and development of OA journals is a key concern for Digital Scholarship and Scholarly Communication librarians at academic libraries. As open source publication tools are being tested and improved, digital scholarship librarians are poised to show off modern publication platforms. Without a full understanding of the political and financial background of open access, these platforms could become obscure, fancy websites containing multitudes of obscure and inaccessible metadata. It is in the context of the OA movement that these publishing platforms can start to be used to replace parts of a collection that may be overpriced, and that negotiating positions can be bolstered. Digital scholarship and scholarly communications librarians should work together as more technology is developed and as legal, contractual precedents for OA deals with big publishers are set.

The reality playing out across Europe and in the US is that publishers are not willingly relinquishing their subscription model; it is an exceptionally profitable model that puts a publisher’s products—and therefore the publisher itself—very close to the academic experience. Faculty, administrators, and librarians can help combat this reality by building new frameworks and infrastructures that can begin to erode the dominant grip many big-name journals have in their disciplines.

References and Recommended Readings

Bishop, Dorothy. 2020. “Nature’s OA Fee Seems Outrageously High – but Many Will Pay It.” Times Higher Education, December 1, 2020. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/natures-oa-fee-seems-outrageously-high-many-will-pay-it.

cOAlition S. 2022. “Plan S: Making Full and Immediate Open Access a Reality.” Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.coalition-s.org/about/.

cOAlition S. 2023. “Towards Responsible Publishing: A proposal from cOAlition S.” October 31, 2023. Accessed December 13, 2023. https://www.coalition-s.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Towards_Responsible_Publishing_web.pdf.

Cooper, Danielle Miriam, and Oya Y. Rieger. 2021. “What’s the Big Deal?” Ithaka S+R, June 22, 2021. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/whats-the-big-deal/.

Council of the European Union. 2023. High-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing. Brussels. Accessed December 6, 2023. https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9616-2023-INIT/en/pdf.

European Commission. 2021. “Online Manual.” Accessed June 6, 2023. https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/funding-tenders-opportunities/display/OM/Online+Manual.

European Commission. 2022. “European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).” Accessed June 6, 2023. https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science/european-open-science-cloud-eosc_en.

European Commission. 2022. “Horizon Europe.” Last modified May 17, 2022. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe_en.

European Commission. 2022. “Open Science.” Last modified January 28, 2022. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science_en.

European Commission. 2023. “High-Quality, Transparent, Open, Trustworthy and Equitable Scholarly Publishing.” May 23, 2023. Accessed December 13, 2023. https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9616-2023-INIT/en/pdf.

European Commission. n.d. “Horizon 2020.” Accessed June 6, 2023. https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-2020_en.

IOPscience. n.d. “Open Access in Poland – Iopscience – Publishing Support.” Accessed June 6, 2023. https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/questions/open-access-poland/.

Kell, Gretchen. 2021. “UC’s Deal with Elsevier: What It Took, What It Means, Why It Matters.” University of California. March 18, 2021. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ucs-deal-elsevier-what-it-took-what-it-means-why-it-matters.

Lewis, David W. 2017. “The 2.5% Commitment.” IUPUI, September 11, 2017. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/14063.

Morais, Rita, Stephane Berghmans, and Vinciane Gaillard. 2022. “A closer look at Open Access to research publications in European universities.” European University Association, January 2022. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://eua.eu/downloads/publications/open%20access%20follow-up%20report.pdf.

Online Library and Publication Platform. n.d. Accessed June 29, 2022. https://oapen.org/.

“Open Access 2020 Executive Summary.” 2020. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://oa2020.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/Open-Access-2020-Executive-Summary.pdf.

“Open Access Agreements for Hungary.” 2022. Springer Nature. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/institutional-agreements/oaforhungary.

Open Archives. n.d. “Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.” Accessed June 29, 2022. https://www.openarchives.org/pmh.

OpenAPC. n.d. Accessed June 29, 2022. https://treemaps.intact-project.org/apcdata/openapc/#institution/country=.

Plan S. n.d. “Principles and implementation.” cOAlition S. Accessed December 6, 2023. https://www.coalition-s.org/addendum-to-the-coalition-s-guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/principles-and-implementation/.

Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. n.d. “Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructures.” Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.euraxess.pl/poland/research-poland-0.

Research Information. 2021. “Jisc Strikes 156-University Deal with Nas.” Last modified July 8, 2021. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.researchinformation.info/news/jisc-strikes-156-university-deal-nas.

ROARMAP. n.d. “ROARMAP: Browse by Country.” Accessed June 6, 2023. https://roarmap.eprints.org/view/country/150.html.

Saenen, Bregt, Rita Morais, Stephane Berghmans, and Vinciane Gaillard. 2021. “Open Science in University Approaches to Academic Assessment: Follow-up to the 2020-21 EUA Open Science Survey.” European University Association (EUA). Accessed December 13, 2023. https://eua.eu/downloads/publications/academic%20assessment%20follow-up%20report.pdf.

Sawers, Paul. 2023. “In letter to EU, open source bodies say Cyber Resilience Act could have ‘chilling effect’ on software development.” April 18, 2023. Accessed December 13, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/in-letter-to-european-commission-open-source-bodies-say-cyber-resilience-act-could-have-chilling-effect-on-software-development/?guccounter=1#:~:text=The%20letter%20reads%3A,process%20by%20lending%20our%20support.

Seltzer, Rick. 2020. “Open Access Comes to Selective Journal” Inside Higher Education, November 23, 2020. Accessed December 13, 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/24/nature-add-open-access-publishing-option-2021.

Silver, Andrew. 2023. “Immediate Open Access ‘Should Be EU Default’, Says Presidency.” Research Professional News, February 9, 2023. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2023-2-immediate-open-access-should-be-eu-default-says-presidency/.

SPARC Europe. 2020. “Setting the Default to Open.” Last modified December 31, 2020. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://sparceurope.org/what-we-do/open-access/.

Springer Nature. n.d. “Institutional Open Access Agreements.” Open research. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/institutional-agreements.

The White House. 2022. “OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay.” August 25 2022. Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp-issues-guidance-to-make-federally-funded-research-freely-available-without-delay/.

Widmark, Wilhelm. 2021. “Will There Be Any Transformation or Are We Stuck with the Transformative Agreements?” UKSG, November 26, 2021. Accessed June 29, 2022. https://www.uksg.org/newsletter/uksg-enews-503/will-there-be-any-transformation-or-are-we-stuck-transformative.