Cambridge University Press has reached a transformative Open Access agreement with the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC).
The three-year ‘read and publish’ deal is the first such agreement between a university press and Spanish research institutions, and the first that Cambridge University Press has signed in southern Europe.
Read and publish deals pay for an institution to access a publisher’s journals and also covers any Article Processing Charges the institution’s authors would normally pay to publish their work Open Access with that publisher.
CSIC is the largest public institution dedicated to research in Spain and the third largest in Europe. Starting in 2020, authors from its 120 affiliated institutions will be able to publish publicly-financed research articles in the Press’s hybrid and fully Open Access journals. In addition, CSIC members will have access to the Press’ full collection of more than 400 journals across STM and HSS.
It follows a number of similar agreements between the Press and higher education and research institutions around the world.
In April the Press reached an agreement with the University of California, its first such deal in the Americas. Other recent read and publish agreements include the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia; the Max Planck Society and the Bavarian State Library in Germany; Jisc in the UK; the Bibsam consortium of Swedish higher education and research institutions, and the UKB consortium of Dutch university libraries.
Chris Bennett, Global Sales Director (Academic Publishing) at the Press, said: ‘The goals of open research support our own mission to disseminate knowledge and we are determined to help shape a sustainable, responsible transition to full Open Access. We see read and publish deals as a key part of that transition
‘This latest agreement with CSIC is a further, clear demonstration of our commitment and while it is the first such agreement we have reached in southern Europe, we very much hope it is the first of many.’
Agnès Ponsati, Director of the Unit of Information Resources for Research at CSIC said: “This agreement is part of the CSIC strategy of progressively abandoning the licensing model based on content subscription and payment for reading. The institution’s commitment to open access as a lever for the promotion of open science contemplates the transformation of agreements with scientific publishers to the model of publishing and reading.
“It is a complicated process, but we are happy to have achieved this agreement with Cambridge University Press, which is the second of its kind in the CSIC and to which we expect so many others to follow.”
