Jisc partners with Copernicus to streamline open access publishing

Jisc has announced a new agreement with Copernicus Publications, a fully open access, not-for-profit publisher, whose portfolio of journals covers engineering, geosciences, humanities and life sciences.

The agreement helps institutions streamline administering open access publication, making it quicker and easier.

Copernicus uses simple, fair and reasonable article processing charges (APCs) and created one of the first public and fully transparent peer-review processes for academic journals.

Jisc members can now set up a prepayment account or choose to be invoiced for several papers on a single invoice.

Anna Vernon, Jisc’s head of portfolio for content licensing, said:

“This new agreement with Copernicus Publications will provide administrative efficiencies for our members. We’re pleased that, with new features that allow open access teams to choose which papers they want to pay for from centrally managed funds, we can finally add Copernicus to our portfolio and further increase our partnerships with small open access publishers.”

Dr Johannes Wagner, business development publications manager for Copernicus Publications, said:

“Copernicus Publications is delighted to sign this agreement with Jisc offering streamlined settlement schemes to all members in the UK, many of which we have been working with successfully for many years. Working with Jisc greatly helps overcome the administrative challenges involved in signing agreements with individual institutions and thereby clearly benefits both researchers and the learned societies we serve.”

The University of Exeter is already seeing the benefits of a membership agreement with Copernicus, having previously signed up independently. Its centralised billing options enable better financial planning and minimise time-consuming administration for the university library.

It found that a more streamlined and seamless publishing process encourages authors to submit their research to smaller, non-profit, fully open access publishers, supporting a healthy and diverse scholarly communications marketplace.

Imogen Ward-Smith, open access publications officer at the University of Exeter said:

“To be able to offer a workflow with Copernicus Publications that is as simple for authors as the workflow of transitional agreements with big for-profit publishers is really important. They can choose to submit to whichever journal is most appropriate for their research without being put off by having to deal with invoicing.”

For more information about the new agreement with Copernicus Publications and to sign up for it, visit the dedicated page on the Jisc subscription manager.