Transcript

Claire Moulton: I’m Claire Moulton, the publisher at The Company of Biologists and today I’m joined by Judith Russell, Dean of Libraries at the University of Florida, to talk about Open Access agreements between publishers and libraries.

Claire Moulton: Judy, how did you find negotiating an agreement with The Company of Biologists?

Claire Moulton: How easy was it and are there any tips that you would like to share?

Judith Russell: When I learned about the Read & Publish agreement in September of 2020, I also learned that we subscribed to all of your journals, and that our authors frequently published in your journals but they weren’t publishing Open Access articles.

Judith Russell: So this seemed like a great opportunity for us to give them the opportunity and choice of doing Open Access.

Judith Russell: Your programme was affordable, it was a cost-neutral model.

Judith Russell: You gave us unlimited access to your full content, including your archives, which is extensive.

Judith Russell: You didn’t have a cap on the number of articles our authors could publish during the time of the agreement, so we weren’t going to get partway through the year and then find that we were turning people down.

Judith Russell: It was really easy to sign up.

Judith Russell: As I say, we had an existing license, we had a simple addendum we were able to sign up very quickly.

Judith Russell: So by learning about it in September, we had it operational by January, which was wonderful.

Judith Russell: It was so easy for our authors because it prompted them with the fact they didn’t have to know about it or ask about it to receive the benefit.

Judith Russell: And we’ve already now had four Open Access articles published just since we started the agreement.

Claire Moulton: Excellent.

Claire Moulton: And we’ve had excellent feedback from authors taking advantage of Read & Publish agreements.

Claire Moulton: They like to publish Open Access and we can see that there is a benefit for authors.

Claire Moulton: For example, our Open Access articles receive at least twice as much usage as our non-Open Access articles.

Claire Moulton: How important was it to you to support smaller, independent publishers embarking on transformative agreements?

Judith Russell: I think that’s very important.

Judith Russell: I think many of us see what happens when the small publishers get sucked into either the bigger journal publishers or even into some of the aggregators, and we really value helping you keep your independence while at the same time, working with you to help you transform to Open Access.

Claire Moulton: Judy, thank you so much for sharing your experience.

Judith Russell: Thank you.