Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a not-for-profit organization creating global licensing, content and Open Access (OA) solutions that make copyright work for everyone, has joined the Gold Open Access Infrastructure program, based in the United Kingdom.
The aim of the program is to establish dialogue and agreement among all key stakeholders on technical infrastructure challenges and to promote consideration of improvements to the systems, standards, and metadata supporting open access academic journal publishing. Other group participants include representatives from publishing, academia, and standards organizations.
The Gold Open Access Infrastructure initiative is derived from the Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, better known as the Finch Report, which outlines principles for a transition in the UK to open access, with a prominent role for “Gold OA.”
Gold OA involves transactions and workflows among authors, publishers, funders, and universities. As a result, significant work on metadata and interfaces is needed to ensure satisfaction of stakeholders’ needs and emergence of a capable and efficient Gold OA market.
“There is a risk that, without some coordination, opportunities for agreement will be lost, leading to a fragmented domain with high transaction costs and inefficiencies for publishers, and a poor level of service for authors, universities and funders,” said Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of New Ventures for CCC. “As a provider of Article Processing Charge (APC) collections and related services for many publishers, we welcome an opportunity to collaborate with all stakeholders on the development of standards to aid in the process.”
CCC, named one of “10 to Watch” by information industry analyst Outsell in its 2013 Open Access Market Report, has been helping publishers improve the author experience in collecting APCs for over six years, and welcomes efforts toward standardization and transparency. CCC also recently joined the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), which offers a forum for bringing together the entire open access community. CCC hosts webinars and podcasts on many aspects of Open Access and works with organizations such as the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) on creating standards around Open Access
