2019 Was Big for Academic Publishing. Here’s Our Year in Review is an article by Diana Kwon in TheScientist on December 27, 2019. Some of the OA-related issues that are reviewed include:
- A brief mention of “concerns about the presence of predatory journals on PubMed”.
- A brief mention of a trend toward “more scientists are opting to deposit their [supplementary] files into online repositories hosted by universities, research institutions, and companies“.
- A section entitled: “UC breaks with Elsevier“. The University of California (UC) has tried to obtain, from Elsevier, “a contract that combines subscriptions to read paywalled journals and publishing in open-access formats into a single fee“. So far, this effort has been unsuccessful. Since July 2019, those at UC have been unable to access new articles published in Elsevier’s paywalled journals.
- In the next section, entitled “Deals are Made“, three deals are noted that do support publication of OA articles, as well as provide access to paywalled papers, all for a single annual fee. These deals are between Wiley and academic consortia in Germany, Norway and Hungary, Deals that involve OA elements are often called “transformative”, Publishers other than Wiley have made transformative deals, even including (more recently) Elsevier, which appears to have become more flexible.
- In a final section, entitled “Changes to Plan S”, the current status of Plan S is reviewed. One of the noteworthy changes is “a softened stance on hybrid journals—they will now be allowed for a limited time if they are a part of a transformative agreement“.
This review provides an excellent summary of noteworthy OA-related developments that happened in 2019.
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