The Swiss national Open Access (OA) strategy and its corresponding Implementation Plan are said to support “a mix of OA models”. However, previous initiatives have mostly focused on Gold OA models and levying of Article Processing Charges (APCs). At the same time, the Green OA road presents a viable and cost-effective solution to increase the accessibility of research results towards the national 100% OA goal. This is a particularly pertaining issue for journals which are not included in the ongoing efforts to sign so-called transformative agreements with major scientific publishers. With this project, we would like to address this hitherto neglected opportunity.
Our ultimate aim is to build up more systematic and efficient workflows for self-archiving journal articles in institutional repositories. More precisely, this project aims at extracting the untapped Green OA potential by facilitating the cooperation between universities of applied sciences (FHs), universities of teacher education (PHs) and the publishers of scholarly and professional journals. These publishing venues have been shown to comprise a large majority of publications at this type of universities in Switzerland by the recently completed “Open Access for Educational and Applied Sciences in Switzerland” (OA-EASI) project funded by swissuniversities. For this purpose, we will draw on the results of the OA-EASI project and extend its work by including more recent data about publishing records from partner institutions.
Building on this analysis, we will develop a set of policies, procedures and workflows for this type of research institutions and affected publishers in order to streamline Green OA self-archiving procedures. Our approach should support both aims:
- To establish formal, standardised Green OA policies that are easy to interpret for researchers and repository managers (incl. registering these new policies in SHERPA / RoMEO database, whenever possible)
- To be responsive enough to the needs and circumstances at this type of universities and practice-oriented publishers.
By the end of the project, good practices for implementing Green OA should be widely adopted by affected institutions in Switzerland and beyond. In this project, a huge majority of FHs and PHs as well as a university of the arts in Switzerland have teamed up either as partner institutions or as associated partners. Our overall objective is to increase visibility and accessibility of publications from our institutions and to fill this gap in the OA landscape in Switzerland and beyond.