The seminar, in the framework of the Open Access Week 2022, was given by Alejandro Santos, librarian and documentalist at ICMAB's Manuel Cardona library. Alejandro Santos explained the conditions, nature and characteristics of this type of agreements, especially the philosophy behind them: to go from the subscription model that underlies the scientific literature, in which publishers are paid for reading, towards a model of paying reasonable costs for publishing in open access.

The transition phase is concretized in these Read and Publish agreements that the organization (CSIC), together with the vast majority of Spanish universities (CRUE), is signing with the main scientific societies and publishers.

At the seminar, Alejandro Santos presented open access statistics of the last two years, especially for 2021, to show the impact of these agreements on the open access publications of the center. The common features and peculiarities of each of the agreements, individualized by publisher, were detailed.

In the 2021 ICMAB publications, 53 % belonged to publishers with agreements for full funding of the fee for publishing open access and correspondence author of the CSIC-CRUE consortium (Spanish universities). 99 out of 219 articles, 45 %, had a corresponding author from ICMAB.

ICMAB publications by editor 2021 | ICMAB, CSIC

As mentioned in the seminar, there are still substantial vacancies left in the quotas of fundable articles for 2022 from our most common publishers, with the exception of the American Chemical Society, in which they are almost exhausted.

The seminar was also useful to compare the current scenario of open publishing in CSIC with that of the near past and, although relativizing the freedom to publish in any journal and publisher, the improvement of the situation was emphasized, with a growth from 10 to 17 agreements of total funding of publication fees since September 2019, including Elsevier, Wiley, Springer-Nature and the aforementioned ACS.

During the seminar, the catalog of Creative Commons licenses that can be adopted for articles in which the author retains the copyright was recalled, and finally a consideration was made on the future of the open movement in science, which should progressively expand until Open Science becomes the only existing Science.

If you would like more information or would like the presentation of the seminar, please contact Alejandro Santos at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

More information:

• Acuerdos Transformativos de Acceso Abierto en el CSIC
• Programa de Apoyo a la Publicación en Acceso Abierto para autores CSIC
• Mandato Institucional de Acceso Abierto CSIC
• Curso Programa de Apoyo a la Publicación en Acceso Abierto para autores CSIC
• Solicitud de subvención para publicar en Acceso Abierto (Intranet CSIC)
• Sherpa Romeo - online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world
• Creative Commons Licenses
  
• License Chooser