Elsevier completes first OA agreement in Asia-Pacific with Japan's JUSTICE
Elsevier has announced a transformative open access (OA) agreement with Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE), Japan’s largest consortium of university libraries.
The agreement commences January 1, 2021 and is Elsevier’s first such in Asia-Pacific. Through the three-year agreement, research authors from JUSTICE member universities will have the option to publish either through a pure subscription model (entirely paywalled) or through a subscription model that allows options for publishing OA: gold, green, or a combination of the two. Additionally, authors will have access to 16 million publications from more than 2,500 journals published by Elsevier and its society partners through Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform.
The deal is envisioned to provide a push for increased open publishing for Japanese researchers and is aligned with JUSTICE’s OA goals charted through its JUSTICE OA 2020 roadmap. The consortium, which comprises more than 500 libraries, was founded in 2011 and has been working toward making research publishing increasingly OA, as publishing costs have been steadily rising in Japan, as is the case worldwide. Seigi Hosokawa, chair of the JUSTICE steering committee, expressed the hope that the agreement “will lead to a major leap forward in promoting open access in Japan.”
In an environment in which academic publishers are being increasingly urged to make their publications more open (most notably through Plan S by the global cOAlition S), Elsevier, the world’s leading academic publisher, has been gradually increasing its OA offerings. In 2019, it launched 100 OA journals, taking its fully open journal count to more than 430. Additionally, 1900 journals are hybrid (a mix of the subscription and open models).
In recent years, Elsevier has been making similar agreements with prominent research-producing nations across the world to help them work toward their OA goals. Japan is one of the leading research-producing nations in the Asia-Pacific region. Gino Ussi, executive vice president, Elsevier, shared that the agreement comes from having “worked closely with JUSTICE and its member universities to understand their research and open access goals.”
Incidentally, the announcement comes shortly after another leading academic publisher, Nature, announced its APCs, which too will come into effect in 2021.
Are you a researcher based in Japan or Asia-Pacific? What’s your response to the agreement? If from a different geography, what do you think of the gradual movement toward OA by publishers and academia alike? Will it transform research publishing; if so, how? Share your thoughts below.
[Image courtesy Miguel Padrinan at Pixabay]
Related reading:
- Plan S: The nuts and bolts
- How is open access shaping scholarly publishing and communication?
- Elsevier signs open access agreement with Swedish consortium and a U.S. university
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