Developing Open Access via the Scientific Publication Support Plan
A partnership between ABES, Couperin, MESR and OpenEdition has been set up as part of the 2022-2026 Scientific Publication Support Plan to promote the transition to open access for online journals on OpenEdition and to support Freemium open access journals more broadly. This tool also exists in forms adapted for Cairn and EDP Sciences, and follows on from the previous 2018-2021 support plan.
At the end of 2021, 80% of journals were available via open access on OpenEdition Journals. To date, this percentage stands at 84%.
In 2022, this plan allowed three journals to waive their digital barriers and adopt a CC 4.0 license for the distribution of new content. These journals are:
- Bulletin de l’association de géographes français (Bulletin of the Association of French Geographers)
- Syria
- Revue des langues romanes (Review of Romance Languages)
Abes, Couperin and the MESR took part in the negotiations between OpenEdition and these journals which led to the following arrangement (subject to compliance with the agreed commitments):
- MESR supports the journals of the Freemium package with €125,000 per year, distributed according to the methods defined for the OpenEdition Freemium programme: 33.4% for the platform and 66.6% for the journals in proportion to their visitor rate;
- MESR supports journals already available via OpenEdition Journals which waive their digital barrier, up to between €1,500 and €3,000 per year depending on visitor rate. At the end of the support plan the journals concerned join the Freemium package;
- the Couperin consortium promotes the support plan by offering establishments a committed 2022-2026 subscription to the Freemium package via the order clustering managed by Abes;
- ABES operates the order clustering and ensures commitment compliance before proceeding with annual financing.
OpenEdition’s commitments
- Maintain COUNTER 5 certification for the duration of the support plan;
- Collaborate with the EzPaarse team as part of the ReadMetrics project;
- Strengthen the dissemination of article metadata by improving indexing via Crossref, Open Citation, scienceplus.abes.fr, etc;
- Reinforce the use of reference identifiers (Orcid, ROR, DOI…);
- Encourage the use of CC licenses.
The journals’ commitments
- Waive their digital barrier;
- No delays in publication;
- Adapt a Creative Commons 4.0 license, preferably the CC BY license;
- Apply to the DOAJ with the support of OpenEdition;
- Encourage the use of author identifiers.
We especially welcome this multi-stakeholder collaboration that supports and promotes Diamond Open Access dissemination.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
OpenEdition team (October 24, 2022). Developing Open Access via the Scientific Publication Support Plan. Open Electronic Publishing. Retrieved April 22, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/siaq