Capacity-building for institutional open access publishing across Europe

Recent years have witnessed a sharp increase in open access publishing activities. Commercial scientific publishers and other service providers have turned their attention to open access publishing, responding to increased demand for open access by funders and research performing organisations. Research institutions have also developed their own open access publishing activities and services. These are either new and based on open access publishing, or are existing publishing activities transitioning into the new digital and open access environment. Libraries are often involved, while new types of mission-driven open access university presses are also emerging in Europe and beyond. Such initiatives do not require article fees for publishing, and are often supported by their institutions. They enable open access publishing of journals and other types of outcomes in various languages and are important in supporting multilingualism in Europe. At the same time, they often have not gained the prestige bestowed on established publishing venues, usually produced in collaboration with well-known commercial scientific publishers. Moreover, institutional publishing in the social sciences and the humanities is often in languages other than English, which is both an asset and a limitation.

This action aims to support institutional publishing initiatives across Europe to improve the quality of their non-technological services to researchers, and to overcome fragmentation, specifically:

1. Activities that provide a comprehensive map of the current landscape of institutional publishing activities across Europe, through the collection of robust empirical evidence on service provision mechanisms, funding processes, gaps, among other things to be specified;

2. Activities that improve the coordination, quality and services of existing and substantial institutional open access publishing in EU member states and associated countries. This can be achieved, in particular, by establishing minimum shared standards and good practices for the non-technological aspects of their services, such as developing high quality journal policies and procedures to make services more efficient and more attractive for researchers (editorial scopes, peer-review policies, organisation of editorial and publishing business processes, translation, among others), developing appropriate business/funding models that support the long-term provision of services, etc.;

3. Explicit and actionable recommendations for strategies and policies to be adopted by research institutions to support the further flourishing of their mission-driven, open access publishing activities in a coordinated fashion across Europe.

Duration: The action should be no longer than 36 months.