For those attending the Charleston Conference, CCC will host When the Deal is Done: Reporting the Transformation on Wednesday, 8 November at 2:40 pm EST, a fireside chat featuring Sybille Geisenheyner, Director of Open Science Strategy & Licensing, American Chemical Society; Jade Yonehiro, Open Access Data Analyst, California Digital Library; and Shannon Reville, Senior Product Manager, CCC. During the session, the panelists will discuss the current state of agreement reporting and review the specific industry reporting templates and guidelines they currently follow. The discussion will explore best practices learned along the way and leverage interactive polling to help shape the conversation and allow the audience to share feedback and their own best practices.

In addition to our hosted panel, CCC representatives will join their industry colleagues on the following panels: 

• On 8 November, Ask The Scholarly Kitchen Chefs will bring together a panel of Scholarly Kitchen Chefs, including Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist, Open Access and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Lyrasis; Robert Harington, Associate Executive Director, Publishing, American Mathematical Society; Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO; and Roy Kaufman, Managing Director, Business Development, CCC, for an interactive discussion around scholarly communications.  
• On 10 November, Batten Down the Hatches: Navigating Challenges and Complexities in Open Access Management will take a look at the complexities surrounding open access management with a panel featuring Matthew Ragucci, Director, Institutional Product Marketing, Wiley; Willa Liburd Tavernier, Research Impact and Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University – Bloomington; and Randyn Heisserer-Miller, Head of Collection Strategies, Colorado State University; and Jamie Carmichael, Senior Director, Information and Content Solutions CCC. 
• On 27 November, The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 will be featured as a Virtual Poster Session. Jack Maness, Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Collections Services, University of Denver, and Jessica Thibodeau, Senior Director, Information and Content Solutions CCC, will discuss the findings of the recent State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 study. 

If you will be at Charleston, please visit us at Booth #128 to learn more about the CCC Scholarly Communications Suite, the industry-tested, data-driven set of tools (featuring RightsLink for Scientific Communications, Ringgold Solutions, and OA Intelligence) that enables publishers to use rich metadata to model, scale, and manage their scholarly publishing programs. You can also learn how Get It Now, the article delivery service from CCC, can help library patrons with the immediate fulfillment of full-text articles from unsubscribed journals and the Annual Copyright License for Higher Education which provides content users campuswide with the copyright permissions they need in a single, multi-use license.  

 Learn more about the Charleston Conference here.   

The post CCC at the Charleston Conference 2023 appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

The Royal Society has a mission to support excellent science and has made a commitment to open access (OA) and open science (OS) as a means of maximizing the dissemination and reuse of research outputs. Can you briefly describe how your OA program has evolved over time?

Over the past 11 years, since the start of 2012, the proportion of our authors choosing to publish open access in our hybrid journals has continued to rise. In 2012 that proportion was ~11% and stood at ~60% at the end of 2022. Our portfolio contains two fully OA journals, Royal Society Open Biology and Royal Society Open Science.

Royal Society’s Transformative Agreements allow researchers to publish OA in any Royal Society journal with no APC fee at the point of use, and to date these agreements cover institutions in the following regions: 

• United Kingdom 
• Europe 
• Middle East and Turkey 
• Australia and New Zealand 
• Africa 
• North America  
• Asia 

Similar coverage exists for our OA Membership agreements, which allow researchers to publish open access in any Royal Society journal with a 25% discount on the article processing charge (APC).

Our mission is to recognise and support excellent science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity and the good of the planet. As the national academy of science for the UK, we support OA and OS as a means of maximising the dissemination and re-use of research outputs.

With growth comes complexity, and you have invested in shared infrastructure to drive efficiencies in your business and to provide a smoother transition for your authors and institutional partners. Can you share an example or two of how automation has helped improve your customer experience?

The Rightslink for Scientific Communications solution has allowed us to easily manage and process our various agreements at the point of acceptance. Authors associated with a Read & Publish deal are easily recognised using Ringgold matching logic, and the customizable touch-free auto-approval workflow removes barriers for the author and institution/funder leading to a smooth publication process. Our OA Membership deals are also automatically recognised and a discount for the author automatically applied.

In partnering with the OA Switchboard, we seek to be able to enhance the publication-level information we share with funders, institutions and authors. The goal being to provide a seamless OA publication journey for authors and more efficient reporting on research published under an OA fund, individually, or under an associated agreement for researchers and funders. A custom connector developed for the Royal Society to communicate with the OA Switchboard has been useful in meeting these aims. The connector ensures that publication-level financial settlement data, for example, APC amount or assignment to an associated Read & Publish deal are recorded in a structured format, combined with VoR publication metadata, and sent to institutions/funders at the point of publication for use in their own analysis and reporting. In 2022, RightsLink added a standard API that passes the authoritative transaction data into our custom Switchboard connector straight from the source.

In your experience, what do customers value most when managing OA publication data across publishers?

Timely access to robust and complete OA publication data at the point of publication is important for authors, institutions and funders to maintain accurate records as well as further analyses and reporting. Publishers often have formats and mechanisms to share information, and OA Switchboard and Rightslink for Scientific Communication can help to standardize and streamline this data. 

Comprehensive and structured publication-level data that can easily be ingested and analysed is very important here to be able to accurately monitor and record research output and make decisions around return on investment in Transformative Agreements.  

What’s ahead for the Royal Society and your customers on your OA journey? 

We will continue to push for OA publishing while recognising the associated benefits while leveraging partnerships and technology advancements to improve the process for authors, funders and institutions. 

Our four research journals, Proceedings A, Proceedings B, Biology Letters and Interface, are Transformative Journals and will move to a fully open access model when 75% of articles are being published open access.

As of 2021 our journals Biology Letters, Interface, Proceedings A and Proceedings B showed that open access papers received, on average, 29% more citations, 34% higher Altmetric scores and 60% more downloads.

We hope to see more institutions signing up to our Transformative Agreements as this will further increase our OA content and move us closer to flipping the four researcher journals. In keeping with our role as the UK’s national academy of science, we fund OA where there is a cost barrier for authors.

With this in mind we have launched our Royal Society Open Access Equity scheme that supports tens of thousands of eligible researchers in over 100 low and middle-income countries and territories with free access to our content and automatic waivers for all journals. 

The post The Benefits of Integrated OA Infrastructure appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Last year, industry expert Herman Mentink explored the challenges that publishers face when crafting OA agreement proposals, specifically the role of quality data in their development. This OA Week, revisit the series (and some other blogs highlighting the importance of data quality) and learn why data is the key to building scalable, sustainable OA agreements.  

Exploring the Challenges in the Shift to Open Access: Part 1 – Data 

Exploring the Challenges in the Shift to Open Access: Part 2 – Pricing Models 

Exploring Challenges in the Shift to Open Access: Part 3 – Communication and Collaboration 

How Data Quality Makes or Breaks Open Access Agreements 

OA Agreement Intelligence: A Collaborative Approach to Innovation 

Learn more about how OA Agreement Intelligence helps publishers leverage their data to scale agreement modeling practices and accelerate data-driven decision-making.  

The post ICYMI: The Importance of Data Quality in Moving Scholarly Publishing Forward appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

• AI Solutions: Trained with Your Content at the Frankfurt Studio – Public Events (Foyer, Hall 4.0) on 19 October 1:00pm – 2:00pm CEST.
• Roy Kaufman, CCC Managing Director Business Development and Government Relations will be speaking at the Scholarly Kitchen panel on “AI and Its Impact on OA” at the Frankfurt Studio – Professional Programme (Foyer, Hall 4.0) on 19 October noon – 1:00pm CEST.

Click this link which takes you to the press release with all the details.

The post CCC Announces New Capabilities for its OA Agreement Management Tool and Participation in Frankfurt Book Fair appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

A commitment by one of the world’s most respected research institutions, for a good start. The support of a university press certainly would help. And $10 million from a leading UK philanthropy – that should seal the deal.

In May, MIT Press and Arcadia put that package together as the Arcadia Open Access Fund. The new endowment will support the MIT Press’s innovative efforts to publish open access books and journals.

Click below to listen to the latest episode of the Velocity of Content podcast.

“We’re really honored by Arcadia and excited to have this commitment,” notes Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of the MIT Press.

“The main reason is to accelerate our capacity to experiment with different types of models,” she tells me. “We’re always thinking ahead to new sustainable open publishing models for books and journals.”

One recent Arcadia-supported effort is shift+OPEN, designed to flip existing subscription-based journals to a diamond open access publishing model.

The post Arcadia Endowment Supports MIT Press Open Access “Experiments” appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

To help address this issue, CCC and Media Growth Strategies collaborated to study metadata management. Our in-depth review expands upon the existing research and resources to uncover policy and system complexities as well as breakages that create missed funding and access opportunities for the communities that open access and open science models are designed to serve.

This is the second in a series of blog posts in which CCC shares this analysis with the scholarly community to spark dialogue and drive action with respect to metadata management during each stage of the research lifecycle. We explore the challenges of each stage, how each stakeholder group is affected, and the impact when these challenges persist.

The first blog in this series looked at the metadata challenges researchers and stakeholders face during the idea development and proposal preparation stages. In this blog, we examine the interactions between researchers and funders during the proposal submission stage. 

Inconsistent Metadata Capture Leads to Ineffective Grant Utilization

During the proposal submission stage, researchers submit applications for funding. The potential funder then selects reviewers and begins the application review process. If the application is approved, the funder will log funding terms in its grant management system.

Interviewees shared that one of the major challenges that emerges during this stage is inconsistent metadata capture. Variability across the grant application process and within its systems can result in the loss of the metadata that’s necessary to determine open access funding entitlements at later stages of the research lifecycle, e.g., institutional affiliations. 

Poor data quality also results in low accuracy of later-stage funding identification and tracking. Poor data quality is often due to limitations of legacy systems and/or lack of awareness. While the free text fields in these systems may facilitate the collection of feedback, they do not automatically capture granular data like organizational identifiers. This inadequate data capture can lead to inaccuracies later in the publication process – for example, researchers confusing proposal numbers with grant IDs. Without disambiguated grant and funder details, grants may not be effectively utilized, leaving open access funding unclaimed and shifting payment obligations to research institutions and/or researchers themselves.

In addition, the lack of registered grant DOIs makes it difficult and costly to link funding to specific research outputs. This results in missed open access opportunities as well as incomplete analysis to inform future funding investments. 

Lack of Systems Interoperability

During the proposal submission stage, we also see multiple systems that need to come together to support the research process. Researchers depend on a variety of systems to do their work, but the systems don’t always work together. Our research found that missing integrations among the systems that researchers use (e.g., CRIS, grant management, curriculum management systems, etc.) often result in gaps in metadata and PID capture. 

Legacy System Limitations Threaten Research Integrity

Another challenge comes when funders select reviewers and begin to review the application for funding. When there’s low adoption of standardized Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) such as FundRef, RAiD, Ringgold, ISNI, and ROR, the process of identifying and managing conflicts of interest among peer reviewers becomes more challenging.  

Guide to Metadata Management Across the Research Lifecycle

While researching metadata management during each stage of the research lifecycle, a key artifact CCC developed by leveraging the data and the insights we gained from this study is an interactive report. This report guides you through metadata management—highlighting the challenges, related impacts, and key decision points. The report also offers the opportunity for you to provide your own input and feedback. 

In our next blog post, we discuss the metadata challenges faced by researchers during the Research & Authoring stage. To learn more, please visit The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 and provide your input through the Feedback function. 

The post The Managing Metadata Series: Stage 2 – Proposal Submission appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

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As part of the latest RLSC release, CCC also adopted the European Statistical Advisory Committee (ESAC) Article List, an OA agreement reporting template.

CCC recognizes the importance of simplifying the management of OA agreements. With this enhancement to RLSC, CCC reaffirms its commitment to facilitating access to scholarly content and supporting the community in its pursuit of OA initiatives.

“This new functionality based on the ESAC Article List will foster standardization according to international best practice across the sector,” said Catherine Ferris, Open Scholarship Officer, Irish Research e-Library (IReL). “This is a welcome and needed addition to the infrastructure supporting OA publishing agreements.”

The post CCC Enhances its Scholarly Communications Workflow Solution, RightsLink for Scientific Communications appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

Drawing on her work as a scholarly author and as Research Impact and Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington, Willa Tavernier moderated an interactive session with three panelists. Together, they reflected on successful collaborations that streamline OA processes, remove unnecessary work for the researchers, and enable cross-stakeholder transparency.

A real-time audience poll first quizzed the room on their own “level of pain (experienced) in managing Open Access.” Half the room who voted said they felt moderate pain, while another quarter said they experienced very severe pain – or worse.

The 75 session attendees were next asked to choose which “stakeholder experiences the most pain in the OA publication process.”

“The low pain ranking given for institutions/consortium may indicate a need for better communication between publishers and institutions on the pain points they experience and what it will take to solve them,” observed Willa Tavernier. “Transformative Agreements may lessen the friction but not every institution has a TA and even for those that do, TAs don’t cover all Open Access publishing.”

“Author/Researcher was the clear loser. This is NOT good,” noted Dr. Jason Price, Research and Scholarly Communication Director, SCELC Library Consortium. “When authors lose, everyone loses.”

CCC’s Jamie Carmichael, Sr. Director, Information and Content Solutions, agreed: “It’s no surprise authors ranked #1, as there is a collective effort ongoing to reduce author friction in OA administration. Improving the author experience is the number one priority on CCC’s roadmap for RightsLink for Scientific Communications, which reflects input from the academic publishers and institutions we serve.

A poll question next asked the SSP audience to rank the elements of OA management from least to most difficult.

“The first and second highest rated issues – ‘funding eligibility awareness’ and ‘modeling and measuring OA deals’ – seem to be two sides of the same problem,” according to David Haber, Publishing Operations Director, American Society for Microbiology.

“If I am an author, I have no idea what deals publishers can give me for my great research,” he explained. “And as a publisher, I have difficulty knowing that the great research that I just accepted is written by someone who is entitled to a special offer” on an article processing charge.

“Author awareness of funding eligibility – identified as the most difficult element of OA management – has a number of technical and timing based solutions available, at least under Read & Publish agreements. The community of stakeholders should make this a priority,” said Dr. Jason Price.

“I think the reason we see most respondents indicating only ‘moderate pain’ over Open Access management is that business operations supporting these OA models have evolved over the last few years, thanks to greater stakeholder collaboration and advancement in underlying infrastructure,” concluded CCC’s Jamie Carmichael.

The post The Powerful Potential of Improving User Experience in Open Scholarly Publishing appeared first on Copyright Clearance Center.

The perspectives of the stakeholder groups included in the report will be represented as panelists discuss the impact on the open scholarly community when metadata management isn’t prioritized and explore pragmatic solutions for future improvement. Panelists will include Randy Townsend, Editor in Chief, GW Journal of Ethics in Publishing, President, SSP; Ana Heredia, PhD, Affiliate Senior Associate, Maverick Publishing Specialists; and Wolfgang Mayer, Head of E-Resource Management, University of Vienna; in a session I will moderate with  Deni Auclair of Media Growth Strategies.

This session will build on the effort Deni and the CCC team undertook to examine metadata management across the research lifecycle, particularly how it impacts the transition to open access (OA). The key element of that exercise was conducting interviews with dozens of community members to map the complexities, breakages, and value of metadata across all research stages. As we conducted these interviews, it became abundantly clear that whether we were speaking to a researcher, publisher, institution, funder, or service provider, metadata is the throughline that connects the various aspects of the scholarly research process, and when gaps exist, everyone feels pain. In this webinar, speakers will share some of the most significant challenges facing the industry and discuss progress toward actionable solutions.

We welcome your feedback on the report at and encourage questions to be submitted before the webinar to events@copyright.com.

You may register for the webinar here and sign up for updates on The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023 report here. 

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