The agreements are the first to result from work undertaken by Jisc Collections, negotiating with smaller publishers to offer a sustainable transition to OA .

The Microbiology Society, Portland Press, IWA Publishing, the Company of Biologists and the European Respiratory Society all now offer transitional journal agreements through the national Jisc consortium.

These ‘read and publish’ two-year pilots allow 100% of UK scholarly output to be published OA in the societies’ hybrid journals, with some including fully OA titles in the fixed-price deals.

Kathryn Spiller, licensing manager at Jisc, who has worked with the societies to negotiate the agreements, says:

“We are delighted to offer smaller publishers a chance to negotiate with a national consortium. OA publishing is becoming within reach, especially now Wellcome has confirmed that these agreements are in compliance with their policy and that their funds can be used to support these agreements. Together we’ll continue to explore new ways in which small learned societies can transition to OA in a sustainable way.”

The Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), a partnership between six health research charities, including the Wellcome Trust, invested £1.3m in OA publishing fees ( APCs ) with UK-based self-publishing learned societies between 2016 and 2018. These five publishers account for just under a third of this investment.



Through these agreements, the sector transitions away from hundreds of individual APC payments to a fixed annual payment between the institution and the publisher, significantly reducing the administrative burden on researchers, institutions, funders and publishers.

Robert Kiley, head of open research at Wellcome, comments: