Open Access means permanent, free and immediate online access to documents for all users. It brings faster sharing of knowledge and the latest findings to the general public, as well as streamlining scholarly communication. For scientists, Open Access can mean higher citation rates for scientific publications and, in turn, increased visibility of
The Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences have been providing corresponding authors with the possibility of publishing articles in Open Access in selected journals without additional fees since of 2023. This is possible thanks to transformative agreements that allow the use of a certain or unlimited number of tokens – vouchers for publishing articles in Open Access mode under certain conditions.
Transformative agreements: How to save millions
Transformative agreements consist of two parts – "Read" and "Publish". "Read" is a subscription to a publisher's journals and "Publish" provides the option to use vouchers for open publishing. Transformative agreements with publishers are concluded by the CzechELib National Centre, which currently has 129 member institutions and of which our Institute has been a member since 2018. The consortium ensures the purchase of key electronic resources for the entire research and education community in the Czech Republic.
The European Commission's main research and innovation funding programme, Horizon Europe, imposes an obligation to ensure open access to scientific information, and this is where transformative agreements play a key role, as they allow the results of work to be published in open access mode.
The unlimited number of vouchers in certain journals mentioned above can be used by authors in American Chemical Society, IOP Publishing and The Royal Society of Chemistry. In selected titles of the following publishers, American Institute of Physics, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis and Wiley, the Institute of Physics have a limited number of vouchers. All detailed information about the number of vouchers for this year and the conditions for their use are available on the internal website of the library.
2024 recapitulation
In 2024, the growing interest in voucher usage was again confirmed (see Figure 1 and 2), with 69 vouchers used compared to the 43 vouchers in 2023, for an estimated amount of approx. CZK 5.7 million (see Chart 4). This represents a 60% increase in voucher use, while the number of unused vouchers is almost the same (see Figure 1).
The highest demand for vouchers, as in 2023, was from the Division of Solid State Physics, which used 30 vouchers. But the highest year-on-year increase (300%) in voucher use was seen in the Division of Elementary Particle Physics (see Figure 3). How were the vouchers used in 2024?
The highest number of vouchers (7) was used in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (IOP). The second place was occupied by ACS Nano (ACS), where 5 vouchers were used. Three vouchers were used in Applied Physics Letters (AIP) and in Material Advances (RSC).
Last year, the Institute paid about CZK 1.3 million for the "Publish" part of the transformative agreements. As already mentioned, if the Institute had not concluded the transformative agreements, an estimated CZK 5.7 million would have been spent. for the 69 articles published in open access.
