New open access policy within Utrecht University
The road to full open access
Utrecht University aims at a publishing climate in which academic authors publish fully open access (OA). The Executive Board of Utrecht University has agreed to a new OA policy to realise this ambition.
As a result of expanding the availability of research results, the transparency, applicability and reuse of these results will increase. In addition, it will benefit the (societal) impact of research. That is why the university wants to increase the number of publications that are published in open access. This fits in with the ambitions in the field of Open Science. Another part of this OA policy is to control the costs of open access publishing.
Below you will read what the new policy means for Utrecht University researchers.
Researchers will publish 100% open access
The essence of the policy is that Utrecht University researchers are expected to make all their publications (journal articles, book chapters and books) open access under an open license. Several roads are possible:
Towards a future-proof open access landscape
Utrecht University aims at a system of full open access publishing for academic journal articles, book chapters and books. Values such as ownership, independence and inclusiveness are vital to this system. That is why the university wants to make it as easy as possible to publish open access while considering a responsible spending of public money.
We look to the future with this new open access policy. We not only ask researchers to publish open access, we also aim at creating an open access landscape with a future proof cost structure. A landscape that facilitates each UU researcher in the best possible way, regardless of the discipline you are working in. Only in this way can we realise our ambition of open access to academic results.
As part of the new policy, investments will be made in contracts with full open access publishers (gold open access). Utrecht University will also invest in transforming existing contracts with publishers to full open access.
Moreover the university will invest in parties that will charge no open access publishing costs to authors (diamond open access). Utrecht University supports journals and platforms, but also the open infrastructure (for instance indexing and archiving) on which they are dependent.
The policy also deals with differences in publication culture between different research disciplines. For instance, Utrecht University will take steps to advance the open access availability of books. This will be done by financing the costs of open access publications of books as well as by participating in sustainable diamond open access infrastructures for books.
This contributes to a more equal playing field for open access publishing. It opens up opportunities for new players in the field of sustainable open access publishing and offers an alternative to large publishers holding a dominant market position.