Enables Transparent and Standardized Industry Reporting For all Open Access Stakeholders
July 18, 2023 – Danvers, Mass. – CCC, the leading provider of Open Access (OA) workflow solutions, announces an enhancement to the processing of OA Agreements for university library consortia in its innovative scholarly communications workflow solution for the OA community, RightsLink for Scientific Communications (RLSC).
Earlier this year, CCC engaged with members of the ESAC Initiative and administrators at university libraries representing nine global consortia across the U.S. and Europe to understand their OA reporting needs and outline an ideal solution together. The conversations resulted in CCC’s adoption of the European Statistical Advisory Committee (ESAC) Article List, an OA agreement reporting template which has become a powerful reference for data sharing practices in support of the move to OA.
The latest RLSC release facilitates automated delivery of the ESAC Articles List to relevant administrators. Scheduled delivery of this critical data enables publishers to communicate with institutional customers and other stakeholders more easily and to monitor agreement performance more efficiently. To support those administrators tracking consortia agreements comprised of many individual institution profiles, the new RLSC features make it easy to monitor the publishing activity of all their member institutions and includes all funding requests placed under their OA agreement as well as more complex funding situations, such as articles where an author opted out and paid themselves, or APC portions paid by authors covered under a “multi-payer” agreement.
“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.”
“Publishers have been working hard to support the data needs of consortia administrators,” said Emily Sheahan, Vice President & Managing Director, CCC. “As an engaged member of the scholarly communications community, CCC works to create first-to-market, award-winning solutions that serve all stakeholders, including publishers, institutions, funders, and authors.”
RLSC makes it easy for scholarly publishers of all sizes to automate and scale OA institutional agreements, reconcile publication fees, and enable funding eligibility checks at submission. It is the most widely-adopted, community-led market solution that simplifies OA agreement administration for publishers, funders, institutions, and authors. With more than 1,800 institutions and funders using the cross-publisher platform to manage funding requests, RLSC supports a comprehensive range of transformative deals, pure OA agreements, membership discounts, and other financial arrangements between publishers and institutions, providing real-time transaction data for all stakeholders.
Last year, CCC launched OA Agreement Intelligence, the only agreement modeling solution that enables publishers to prepare, build, and analyze their OA data to create and communicate sustainable and transparent agreements with their partners. The solution combines sophisticated institutional affiliation disambiguation with easy-to-use analysis and export capabilities.
CCC is an active partner in the evolution of OA publishing models. For years, CCC has brought together key OA stakeholders from the author, publisher, institution, funding, and vendor communities through roundtables, panel events, webinars, and podcasts. CCC is a member of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), STM (International Association of STM Publishers) and SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing).
At the London Book Fair in April, CCC unveiled The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023, a visual report conducted in collaboration with Media Growth Strategies that depicts the complexities and value of metadata throughout the scholarly research lifecycle. The findings draw on dozens of research interviews about the significant economic and social impact that a fragmented metadata supply chain has today on researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers—particularly in the transition to OA.