CAUL and CSIRO Publishing collaborate to enable Open Access in Australia and New Zealand
Globally, transformative agreements are being used as a way for the research community, academic libraries, and scholarly publishers to work together to find a financially viable and sustainable path to transition to an open access publishing model.
Early in 2020 representatives of the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) met with CSIRO Publishing to explore how they might work together to accelerate the move towards Open Access in Australia.
Discussions followed with CAUL facilitating conversations, curating input from the academic library community and sharing their findings with our team. In return we worked on agreements that would be viable and flexible enough to accommodate the variety of institutions involved.
The result is that many CAUL member institutions across Australia and New Zealand now have active Transformative Read and Publish Agreements in place. There is no change to the existing standards for submission or peer-review. Eligible authors are identified by their Ringgold ID and relevant institutional email domain and offered the option of open access for their articles. Choosing the open access option allows authors to publish without incurring any fees for Article Processing Charges.
The transformative agreements are underpinned by fees funded by the CAUL member institutions.
“Finding a viable way to transition the publishing business model to Open Access has been a significant challenge. CSIRO Publishing needed to increase the access to published research while allowing us to maintain the highest standards of peer review and publishing practices. The collaboration with CAUL, whose people have been really good to work with, has been instrumental in progressing this initiative in Australia.” said Andrew Stammer, Director CSIRO Publishing.
Jill Benn, Chair of CAUL and University Librarian at the University of Western Australia, states: “Partnering with CSIRO Publishing for an open access agreement shows the benefit of collaboration between publishers, researchers and libraries. We believe that important Australian funded research should be available to all, and not hidden and inaccessible behind paywalls. We applaud CSIRO Publishing in taking this initiative in making research outputs openly available. We expect there will be far reaching societal and scientific benefits globally and for Australia, especially where that research addresses challenges specific to Australians.”
Read more about Read and Publish on our journal pages.
About CAUL
CAUL is the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia. CAUL members are the University Librarians or equivalent of the 39 institutions that have representation on Universities Australia and the 8 members of the Council of New Zealand University Librarians (CONZUL). CAUL makes a significant contribution to higher education strategy, policy and outcomes through a commitment to a shared purpose: To transform how people experience knowledge – how it can be discovered, used and shared.