What is required to make ‘offsetting’ work for the open access transition

This paper makes the case for stronger engagement of libraries and consortia when it comes to negotiating and drafting offsetting agreements. Two workshops have shown a clear need for an improvement of the current workflows between academic institutions and publishers in terms of author identification, metadata exchange and invoicing. Publishers need to invest in their editorial systems, while institutions need to get a clearer understanding of the strategic goal of offsetting.

To this purpose, strategic and practical elements will be introduced. Firstly, the Joint Understanding of Offsetting, launched in 2016, will be discussed. Secondly, this paper proposes a set of recommendations for article workflows and services between institutions and publishers, These recommendations should be seen as a minimum set of practical and formal requirements for offsetting agreements and are necessary to make any publication-based open access business model work.