Jisc Collections, the UK academic community's shared service for content licensing and administration, has entered into an agreement with Open Access Key (OAK), an online payment platform for open access (OA) publishing, to run a 12 month pilot project, Jisc APC. The pilot will test the service's role in managing and processing Gold OA article payment charges made by its member institutions.
The new Jisc APC service will seek to reduce the administrative burden on the various parties involved in making an article available. The combined offering is seen to bring together OAK's innovation in this new area and the trusted status of Jisc Collections in processing and managing payments on behalf of UK institutions and publishers.
An invitation to participate will shortly be issued by Jisc Collections to UK Institutions interested in joining the project. Discussions with publishers will commence at the same time. The pilot will be overseen by a steering group comprising stakeholders and funders from across the education and research sector.
The pilot commences officially on April 2, 2013 and is in response to the publication of the Finch Report in the UK and the subsequent announcements from RCUK. The report recommended a balanced programme of action to enable more people to read and use the publications arising from research, and to accelerate the progress towards a fully OA environment. The report also made a clear policy direction towards the support for Gold OA publishing in the UK, where publishers receive their revenues from authors rather than readers, and so research articles become freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication.
