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Limit on Springer and Emerald publications

Posted on by Louise Otting - Updated

The TU Delft Library is constantly negotiating bilateral and national deals with publishers to ensure our researchers don’t have to pay for publishing and to make certain they comply with the requirements from their funders.

Sometimes a fixed number of scientific publications is part of a contract, this means that our researchers can publish Open Access without extra costs until the maximum is reached. You can read more about that here. For example the Dutch Universities have bought 2.080 APC’s for the publisher Springer for this year, this means 173 publications a month. It is possible that our maximum is reached before the year is out, even if we try to prevent that as much as we can. In some cases we can buy extra Article Processing Charges (APC’s) in others this is not possible or not advisable, since we need to think about our negotiating strategy as a university, but often also as a country. 

In order to create a sustainable publishing culture and have a stronger position to negotiate from, we work together with the other Dutch Universities. To give the message to the publishers that we do not have unlimited funds, the Library directors together with the VSNU can decide to not buy extra APC’s. It is important that we close ranks on this in order for that to work. A strategy is vital, because the costs for access to sources and for publishing keep rising significantly.
  
Part of this is explained by the fact that article publication at TU Delft has grown 39% in 10 years and Open Access cost have risen over 300%, but for a large part it is also because of the costs the publishers increase each year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The CvB has asked us to meet these challenges and create a new collections strategic plan. Part of this is also creating a better communication with the faculties, through the Publication and Collection taskforces and to be more transparent on usage and costs of the collection.

If you as a researcher are effected by an APC cap there are still options to publish Open Access and comply with the requirements of your funder. You can find more information on Open Access publishing or you can always contact us with questions through library@tudelft.nl, we’re happy to help.

If you have ideas, feedback or other comments I’d very much like to hear them. You can leave a comment or e-mail me directly.

Library

Designing a new Publication and Collections Dashboard

Posted on by Louise Otting

Image of dashboards

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an easy overview of where your research is published, how you are doing on the Open Access/ Open Science front, what journals your researchers are reading and many more related topics?

In autumn 2021 we hope to work together with the faculties in brand new collection and publication taskforces. These taskforces are important to make sure our collection and publication services evolve according to the wishes and needs from each faculty.

One of the ideas we’ve come up with to facilitate these discussions and provide transparency is to create a dashboard with all sorts of information regarding these subjects. This was also a recommendation from the consultants of  InformationPower, as you can read in their A Vision for 21st-Century Scholarly Collections report.

What do we want to share?

Previously we’ve created a ‘Current subscription’ list for all the faculties, to give them more insight in the numbers regarding subscriptions and publications. For the dashboard our first step is to create a minimal version that needs to provide that same information at the least.

With the dashboard we aim to include more information, like is the publication Open access and what kind? How often was the publication shared, quoted or covered in the media? What are the APC costs and how have they developed in the last few years? What are the costs of our subscriptions and how often do we make use of them?

This first version of the dashboard will only be the starting point and we will continue to improve and expand the dashboard according to the input we receive from the taskforces. That way we can have discussions based on facts and figures to find our way forward in these interesting times.

Next steps

With the support of the Data Insights team and the Strategic Development team we’re creating the Dashboard in Tableau . This may sound easy, but we still have to come up with ways to combine all our different sources, clean the data and figure out the best way to show and  filter it. Another challenge is finding ways to import the data automatically or at least in a very easy way. For the ‘Current subscription’ list we had to import a lot by hands and it took a lot of time.

We’re now in the middle of setting up a team for this project, so if you like to participate or want to recommend someone, let me know. The team will invest time in learning an Agile approach to this project, so we can easily adjust and be flexible when we get input from the faculties. We also like to train ourselves in the basics of Lean, so we all speak the same language and can connect with other departments who are also being trained in the Lean way of thinking about continuous improvement of services and processes. Fortunately several members of the Process Steward Network have already stated their support and are willing to share their knowledge.

If you have ideas, feedback or other comments I’d very much like to hear them. You can leave a comment or e-mail me directly.

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