As open access (OA) is continually on the rise, OA business models are transforming and becoming more diverse. To better serve the growing need for a streamlined and robust OA infrastructure, IGI Global has embarked on many new OA partnerships and initiatives to support greater OA content and data distribution, including IGI Global’s latest work to integrate with the
OA Switchboard.
The OA Switchboard initiative is a not-for-profit collaboration between funders, institutions, and publishers to provide essential infrastructure to facilitate the fulfilment of open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements. The OA Switchboard is the independent intermediary, connecting parties and systems, streamlining communication and the neutral exchange of open access related publication-level information, and ensuring a financial settlement.
Ultimately, the OA Switchboard works to enable publishers, funders, and institutions to send, receive, and respond through a standardized messaging protocol between them, designed with and for the people who will use it. It was developed to be a central information exchange hub that connects parties, leading to a more streamlined and standardized level of communication between the relevant and necessary parties on such matters including eligibility inquiry or publication/payment settlement notification for OA publications.
The nuances and intricacies associated with different publishers’ models come with or without individual processing charges, some with special agreements with publishers (see
IGI Global’s Transformative Open Access Initiative), and some through sponsorship models. The OA Switchboard sees the increase in complex agreements between publishers and institutions, along with the rise in policies associated with OA works by academic institutions and funders and the challenges that arise with the implementation of these policies, including:
- A myriad of systems and processes
- Many-to-many relationships to be maintained between the multitude of stakeholder groups (and their members)
- Manual and human interaction
- Inconsistent terminology, lack of (use of) persistent identifiers
- Lack of oversight and real-time monitoring, thus difficulty in detailed billing and in tracking spend and committed funds
To combat these issues, the OA Switchboard contributes to the solution by providing shared infrastructure, standards, and back office service for publishers, institutions, and funders. Specifically for publishers such as IGI Global, the OA Switchboard adds values in the realm of:
- Simplicity and transparency
- Collaboration and inter-operability
- Efficiency and cost-effectiveness
- Opportunity for better customer service:
- for authors/researchers
- for institutions and funders
The OA Switchboard is a tool that can be called when needed or integrated in stakeholders’ own systems and workflows to achieve automation and scalability. It is the supreme goal of the OA Switchboard to start a breakthrough and transformation of the publishing market so that OA is supported as the predominant model of publication in the future. IGI Global is thrilled to be entering into this new collaboration.
For more background information about the OA Switchboard initiative, please view the following case study
here.
About IGI Global
Founded in 1988, IGI Global, an international academic publisher, is committed to producing the highest quality research (as an active full member of the Committee on Publication Ethics “COPE”) and ensuring the timely dissemination of innovative research findings through an expeditious and technologically advanced publishing process. Through their commitment to supporting the research community ahead of profitability, and taking a chance on virtually untapped topic coverage, IGI Global has been able to collaborate with over 150,000+ researchers from some of the most prominent research institutions around the world to publish the most emerging, peer-reviewed research across 350+ topics in 11 subject areas including business, computer science, education, engineering, social sciences, and more.
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Emma Baronak
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