The Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) and Taylor & Francis have established a three-year open access agreement that will expand OA publishing options for researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand beginning in January 2026.
The agreement ensures that research articles from participating institutions will be published open access in Taylor & Francis and Routledge journals. For the first time, the partnership extends support to authors choosing fully open access journals, in addition to hybrid titles.
Taylor & Francis has announced that the partnership will support the expansion of its open access collective funding model, the Collective Pathway to Open Publishing. With sufficient support, several humanities and social sciences journals with significant Australasian authorship are expected to convert to open access for their 2026 volumes, including the Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association. If conversions proceed, researchers worldwide will be able to publish in these journals without paying article publishing charges.
In addition to maintaining read access to Taylor & Francis’ journal portfolio, the agreement addresses the role of artificial intelligence in teaching and research. It permits the use of licensed Taylor & Francis proprietary content with AI technologies for noncommercial research and educational purposes under defined safeguards. Examples include using AI tools to summarize journal articles for teaching preparation or generate discussion prompts.
The organizations involved have indicated that collaborative negotiations supported by the CAUL Open Access Negotiation Strategy Committee (COANSC), alongside Universities Australia and Universities New Zealand, contributed to achieving these outcomes. The negotiations are described as demonstrating the potential of coordinated sector-wide engagement to meet open access objectives while managing expenditure.
The agreement is also characterized as supporting sustained and innovative approaches to open research across journals and books during a period of global change for higher education. Participants have emphasized that partnership-based negotiations have resulted in a shared vision for expanding open access through a stable and sustainable arrangement.
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