Open Access reporting

Publish and Read transformative agreements launched as pilots in 2020 spurred on the requirement for regular reporting on Open Access (OA) articles published in our journals. As we plan the roll-out of Publish and Read to the widest possible global audience, we are pleased to provide the following mechanisms for easy exchange of information for our institutional customers, for those who have signed up to a Publish and Read agreement, and those considering doing so; for consortia managers, research funders and anyone involved in managing and advocacy of OA in their university. 

The reporting and workflow mechanisms now in place are:

OA Switchboard

Organisations that sign up to the OA Switchboard will receive direct alerts when an article by corresponding authors from their institution is published OA and can build standardised reports across participating publisher’s data. The value of the Switchboard to libraries and funding organisations newly managing OA strategies is in monitoring compliance and output.

As community-based infrastructure, the OA Switchboard, founded by OASPA in 2020, is an independent intermediary and integrator, connecting parties and systems, and streamlining the communication neutral exchange of OA related publication-level information. 

The OA Switchboard (OASB) sends structured article data in standardized (JSON or Excel) formats to libraries in the metadata. Connectors customised for the Society by OASB’s technology partner, Elitex, combines funder and pricing data from several sources and delivers messages in the standardised protocol with:

• VoR article data directly from our publishing platform, Ingenta, with article processing charge (APC) prices paid for OA articles not covered by Publish and Read.
• Manuscript data on accepted articles routed for OA, either with an APC price (which includes any applicable discounts), or not for those covered by Publish and Read deals.

Further information can be found at oaswitchboard.org.

Direct your enquiries regarding signing up to the OA Switchboard to: Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director, [email protected].

OA manuscript tracking via CCC RightsLink for Scientific Communications

An industry-leading collaboration between Aries Systems’ Editorial Manager and Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink for Scientific Communications (RightsLink) provides a smooth author journey by powering fee-free and APC-funded routes to OA publication that are seamlessly integrated into the manuscript workflow. RightsLink also offers rich insight for Institutions who wish to track OA output and expenditures in a single view across more than 30 participating RightsLink publishers. 

RightsLink’s OA agreement management tools are used to facilitate OA publishing agreements between other leading publishers and nearly 1000 institutions worldwide. Institutional customers upgrading to the Microbiology Society’s Publish and Read transformative agreement will now use the same intuitive interface and dashboard to review, approve, and report on OA funding. 

The RightsLink platform, developed for a range of publisher needs, is described here. ‘Uncapped’ transformative agreements including our Publish and Read agreement require customers to:

• Turn on auto-accept: Agreement Manager allows institutions to accept/deny papers under some drawdown models; we have no workflow means to deal with denials under an unlimited CC-BY OA by default. Detailed instructions and FAQs can be found here.
• Ignore pricing and invoicing information: RightsLink Agreement Manager is auto-populated from an APC price, but that is NOT how your Publish and Read price has been calculated.

Publishing history tracker

As we embark on a renewal season actively promoting conversion to Publish and Read transformative agreements, we have also developed a simple and accessible solution (not suitable for concurrent use, so please try again later if you see activity), hosted on our own publishing platform here, which will provide customers with a look-up to track their researchers’ publishing history in each of the Society's journals.