Our role in open access

Our open research services are easing the move to open access by providing user-friendly and cost-effective ways to automate workflows, assessing compliance, sharing good practice, carrying out benchmarking, and influencing third parties such as publishers and funders.

Find out more about the role Jisc plays in open access policy creation, expression and engagement, sector negotiations with publishers, and the different routes to open access.

Policy and engagement

Our work is developed in line with UK government, funding councils and research funders' policies. We are working to ensure that the open access policy environment offers the maximum benefit with minimum burden for UK research and the wider economy and society, but we do not have a policy position on how this is achieved.

We are in regular contact with officers within UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Wellcome, as well as maintaining close relationships on this topic with Universities UK (UUK).

In all this work, we benefit from reflection and advice from our open access sector group, with representatives from:

• Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL)
• Research Libraries UK (RLUK)
• Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) 
• United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR)

European and international policy

We participate in a small number of highly influential networks to benefit UK universities in this area:

• Knowledge Exchange – current focus is on Alternative Publishing Platforms, small publishers transitioning to open access and working with scidecode science consulting to investigate persistent identifiers (PIDs)
• We are the UK National Open Access Desk (NOAD) and a partner in the OpenAIRE project
• We collaborate with partners across the European Union on the DIAMAS and PALOMERA projects

Policy expression

While we inform policies themselves we can also see that, in some cases, total alignment of policies will not be possible. Having those differences expressed clearly is important for those trying to implement them. We have worked with open policy finder and the Registry of Open Access Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) among others to develop a schema for funders’ and institutions’ open access policies, which we are now promoting. We are also taking part in the PALOMERA project to ensure that European Open Access policies for long-form publications are aligned.

Publishers have policies too, for example, associated with the journals, books or chapters that they publish. These are documented in our open policy finder, but we are also working directly with publishers, alongside funders, libraries and others, to see whether the expression of those policies can be made clearer.

Negotiating a transition to open access

Jisc is supporting higher education with the transition to open access through the negotiation of a range of transitional (transformative) and open access agreements which enable UK research output to be published open access in accordance with UK funder policies. Our strategic groups set the direction of negotiations and ensure that our members' requirements are embedded into our service.

Approach to negotiations

Our negotiations are sector-led and governed by the UUK Jisc Content negotiation strategy group, Transitional agreement oversight group and our Jisc content expert group. We work with our members and strategy groups to review their priorities and develop their requirements for open access agreements. The requirements are endorsed by the UUK/Jisc content negotiation strategy group. Our approach is also informed by the LIBER principles for publisher negotiations, the principles of Plan S, and the objectives of the OA2020 global initiative to accelerate the transition to open access.

Our objective is to put in place agreements that reduce and constrain costs, accelerate open access publishing, support innovation and increase transparency. Our agreements enable our members to comply with and implement research funder policies. UKRI and Wellcome have confirmed that the open access block grants they award to institutions can be used to contribute to the costs of the agreements we negotiate to meet the sector's requirements.

Our negotiations encourage publisher participation in Publications Router for the delivery of publication metadata and full-text articles to repositories, and JUSP to support institutions in their evaluation of agreements.

We seek agreements with all reputable publishers and societies that have received payments for open access publishing services from major UK funders. In this work, we guide smaller publishers (including societies and fully Open Access publishers) in developing offers that support the transition to open access. Read our general guidance materials for publishers and our guidance for publishers on complying with the UKRI open access policy.

Routes to open access

Transitional agreements

Our transitional agreements convert subscription expenditure to support immediate open access publishing of research output and continued access to read content that remains behind a paywall.

Find out more about transitional agreements

Fully open access agreements

We support and promote alternative and innovative fully open access publication models with both established publishers and born open access publishers

Find out more about fully open access agreements

Compliant green agreements

We require publishers to provide a green open access option that complies with funder policies, including CC-BY licensing.

Find out more about compliant green agreements