Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics, and the Kooperation E-Medien Österreich (KEMÖ) / The Austrian Academic Library Consortium, including the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), have agreed on a three-year pilot to support continued reading and open access (OA) publishing for Austrian researchers. This pilot allows OA publishing in Elsevier’s hybrid journals together with an additional one-year agreement that will support Austrian researchers to publish in fully gold open access journals. This agreement complements Elsevier’s transformative and pilot agreements across many European countries and represents libraries, the funder and the publisher coming together to support open access.
Elsevier will support the Austrian researcher community’s ambitions, making their latest research freely available at the point of publication. Elsevier is determined to find the right solutions for our customers and meet our customers’ diverse OA requirements across different academic institutions worldwide. We do so while critically ensuring published research remains trusted and of a high quality. This agreement will support over 40 Austrian institutions, helping them share their latest research globally.
The new agreement program will take effect from January 1, 2021 through to the end of 2023.
We continue to test and learn from the OA agreements that are already being put into practice with institutions and governments worldwide, which enables us to work with our partners to continually improve our OA offerings, such as building new workflows and submission processes to provide greater visibility, transparency and a best-in-class publishing experience for authors.
Brigitte Kromp, University of Vienna, Head of the Austrian Central Library for Physics and Chemistry Library and representative for Open Access in the Austrian Academic Library Consortium said: “This agreement with Elsevier represents a significant step towards our goal of making Austrian research accessible to all. An important feature of this pilot agreement is that articles in the eligible hybrid and gold open access journals are included, offering full flexibility to researchers at participating institutions. We will continue our discussions with Elsevier on including the Cell Press portfolio and other journals that are currently excluded from the agreement.”
Ulrike Fenz-Kortschak, interim director of the KEMÖ Head Office, emphasizes, “that it has been possible to unite several member types represented in KEMÖ, including: public universities, private universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes and a research funder in order to cover a big spectrum of the tertiary education sector in Austria with this read and publishing agreement.”
Gino Ussi, Executive Vice President, Elsevier said: “This pilot contract with KEMÖ is a great opportunity to explore new ways to support their researchers to share their research globally, and we welcome the participation of FWF as the leading national funder in Austria. The Elsevier team is looking forward to supporting Austria’s world-class researchers to access and publish credible, high quality, trusted research. In 2021, the importance of helping researchers advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society has never been more critical, and we are committed to helping make Austria research available to all.”
The agreement is the latest in a series of transformative agreements Elsevier has reached with customers across Europe, the US, Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
In 2020 Elsevier published nearly 81,000 gold or pay-to-publish OA articles an increase of 65 percent over 2019, making us one of the largest open access publishers in the world. Nearly all of Elsevier’s 2,600 journals now enable OA publishing, including 500 fully OA journals.
Elsevier enables researchers to stay up to date with the latest science, technology, and health findings worldwide via ScienceDirect, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature. Overall, ScienceDirect gives researchers access to 18 million articles from over 2,600 journals published by Elsevier and our society partners.
