The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) have announced an agreement for BTAA members to participate in PLOS’ Community Action Publishing (CAP) program. The agreement ensures time to test and evaluate the new community-based model and allows BTAA researchers to publish in PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine without incurring fees. The BTAA and PLOS will also collaborate on future data, metrics, and tools for institutions to evaluate Open Access publishing agreements.
The BTAA is the largest consortium globally to participate in both CAP communities, meaning that every member has committed to the full three-year pilot. As some of the largest research institutions in the world and major contributors to both journals, the BTAA commitment ensures the new collective action-based model kicks off with a strong foundation.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance members are: Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, University of Iowa, University of Maryland–College Park, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago. PLOS has extended the benefits of the agreement to include most system, regional, and branch campuses of these universities.
CAP is PLOS’ effort to sustain highly selective journal publishing without Article Processing Charges for authors. More information about the model can be found at https://plos.org/publish/publishing-faqs/#plos-community-action-publishing.
The BTAA publishing deal continues the momentum for PLOS in 2020, following other agreements with the University of California system, Jisc and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network among others.
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