Austrian Transition to Open Access (AT2OA)

In 2016 the expert group called “Open Access Network Austria” (OANA) published 16 recommendations on how Austria should support a transition to open access (OA). The overarching recommendation is that “By 2025, a large part of all scholarly publication activity in Austria should be Open Access. In other words, the final versions of most scholarly publications (in particular all refereed journal articles and conference proceedings) resulting from the support of public resources must be freely accessible on the Internet without delay (Gold Open Access).” These recommendations generated discussions across the sector and questions were raised over costs. In order to address these questions and to explore wider implications, the Austrian university libraries submitted a joint application to the Ministry of Science, Research & Economics and managed to secure funding for a project entitled “Austrian Transition to Open Access” (AT2OA). The goal of the AT2OA project, launched in 2017, is to support the large-scale transformation of scholarly publications from Closed to OA, and to implement measures supporting this initiative. The project aims to increase Austria’s OA publication output by restructuring license agreements with publishers and by providing targeted support for researchers’ publication activities. It will also establish new venues for OA publishing. Currently there are seven transition agreements (see https://konsortien.at/openaccess-en.asp) in place within the framework of the Austrian Academic Library Consortium (KEMÖ). During the talk we will discuss lessons learned and present the first results of our analyses.