Increased Open Access Publishing with new IOP Publishing agreement

At the turn of the year, the Bibsam Consortium´s previous agreement with IOP Publishing ended and was replaced by a new transformative three-year agreement with the publisher.

Photo: Maja Atterstig

In 2020, Lisa Olsson, on behalf of the Bibsam Consortium, conducted an evaluation of the previous IOP Publishing agreement. She examined publishing output, administrative workflow, and identified strengths and weaknesses of the agreement.

The report is in Swedish, but with an English summary.

In discussions with the publisher, the Bibsam Consortium used the evaluation to prioritize possible improvements for the new agreement. The part that Olsson highlighted as positive, increased open access publishing, is strengthened and unlike the previous agreement, unlimited publishing in fully open access journals is now included.

A number of hybrid journals have been added to the automatic identification of eligible articles, which means that publishing with open access in hybrid journals is estimated to increase from 88 to 130 articles per year. Validation of articles is no longer required by participating organisations, making the administrative workflow more efficient.

In the previous agreement, parts of the publication fees were refunded in the form of a deduction from the following year's fee for the agreement (so-called “offset”). With the new agreement, unlimited open access publishing is prepaid and the discount is included in the yearly fee.

Reading access has been expanded and now includes two new IOP journals and the full ECS Digital Library (six journals).

Read more about the new agreement: