The OA Switchboard initiative (www.oaswitchboard.org) is a not-for-profit collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers to provide essential infrastructure to facilitate open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements. Throughout 2020, a project (overseen by OASPA, funded through sponsorship) is being run to prepare for the OA Switchboard to go live as an operational solution. When the OA Switchboard moves to an operational stage, following a successful 2020 project, a sustainable governance structure and funding model will be in place.

Since May 2020, Unpaywall Journals is now called: Unsub! That’s the only change–all the functionality is still the same, and of course it’s still the same Our Research team behind it. This new name reflects two changes: first, data has been added beyond Unpaywall ;  second, Unpaywall Journals evolved into an increasingly focused tool, built to help libraries unsubscribe from Big Deals with confidence. The result: Unsub! A tool to help librarians forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal.

Megajournals have been at the heart of the Open Access (OA) publishing model, spearheading its growth over the last 15 years. Titles such as PLOS ONE (ISSN: 1932-6203) and Scientific Reports (ISSN: 2045-2322) have been enormously influential and commercially successful. Nonetheless, the commercial success of megajournals is not guaranteed and their long-term performance has been occasionally unreliable, introducing uncertainty in an industry that has been particularly attractive to investors for its ability to generate low but sustainable growth.

Transparent pricing is a cornerstone of the Plan S principles: When Open Access publication fees are applied, they must be commensurate with the publication services delivered and the structure of such fees must be transparent. [Principle 5]

To deliver on this commitment, cOAlition S has:

1. Endorsed two Price Transparency Frameworks; the one developed by Information Power and the one developed by the FAIR Open Access Alliance.

2. Determined that from 1^st July 2022, only those publishers which adhere to at least one of the approved Frameworks will be eligible to receive funds from cOAlition S members.

Journal applications for DOAJ are reaching the milestone of +500 titles assessed by the ‘North Africa & Middle East’ (NAME) editor group at DOAJ. This editor group made a study of the African and Arab journals in the DOAJ. The study concludes that although many Arab journals are online, participation in the DOAJ is very little, and African journals tend to adhere to other databases. Rejection of applications from Arab countries is quite high and that is due to a reluctance towards Open Access, ignorance of the main features of Gold OA, and lack of appliance to principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications. Efforts need to be made to encourage publishing in Arabic and national languages, to assist publishers to meet requirements of peer-reviewing, publication ethics, copyright and licensing.

LIBER has won a role in Open Research Europe (ORE): a project which will build a new peer-reviewed Open Access publishing platform so that Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries can publish research openly and free of charge.

Following a public consultation cOAlition S announces updated criteria for Transformative Journals. cOAlition S defines a Transformative Journal as “a subscription/hybrid journal that is committed to transitioning to a fully (OA) journal. In addition, a Transformative Journal must gradually increase the share of Open Access content and offset subscription income from payments for publishing services (to avoid double payments)”. cOAlition S members have made several changes and simplifications to the way they define a Transformative Journal. Publishers who wish to develop a Plan S compliant Transformative Journal should complete the form at https://www.coalition-s.org/tj-forms.

As part of its continued strategy to enhance its metadata offering, DOAJ is constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and recency of the DOAJ article metadata. DOAJ can edit article metadata itself, including the URL, directly in the database. This makes changes immediate and goes a long way to improve the reliability of the DOAJ metadata. This is one of the good reasons why the DOAJ is one of the partnering data sources of the ISSN Portal.

The OA Switchboard aims to facilitate the fulfilment of open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements, and reduce complexity for all relevant stakeholders. After an initial meeting of key stakeholders and subsequent feedback following presentations on the OA Switchboard concept, work has been done to further explore the feasibility of this idea and gauge the level of interest in the community to participate.  OASPA’s role moving forward is monitoring the progress of the project and making sure it is managed as prudently and efficiently as possible.

As interest in Subscribe to Open grows based on the experiences of early innovations, publishers and libraries need to develop an understanding of the various approaches to Subscribe to Open and the benefits and limitations of the model.