*Update January 14: Agreement reached with Elsevier on a new deal.
On January 13, 2025, Sikt published this news article about the negotiations with Elsevier: "Successful negotiations with Elsevier result in significant savings for Norwegian research institutions".
From the University of Oslo's perspective, achieving a significant cost reduction in a new agreement with Elsevier was essential.
Employees and students at UiO and OUS are now ensured reading access to scientific articles and full coverage of open publishing in Elsevier's hybrid journals and pure open access journals.
Negotiations with Wiley and Taylor & Francis are still ongoing, and the information below remains relevant for these two publishers.
The agreements are intended to ensure that employees and students at UiO and Oslo University Hospital (OUS) have reading access to scientific articles and full coverage for open access publishing within a sustainable cost model.
As negotiations with Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis are now taking place in overtime, the possibility of covering the cost for open access publishing through the agreements will lapse in January. There is also the possibility that this will affect access to scientific articles published by these publishers.
Open Access Publishing
If there are still no agreements in place by January 1st 2025, articles that are accepted for publication in the subscription journals (hybrid publishing) of Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis will not have their open access publishing costs covered. However, researchers can still publish in these journals.
Articles that must be published behind a paywall due to the lack of an agreement, still fall under UiO's Rights Retention Policy. This ensures that the accepted manuscript version (AAM) uploaded to Cristin, can be made available with a Creative Commons license and without embargo in UiO's institutional repository. This way, requirements for open access through self-archiving, also referred to as green open access, are fulfilled.
For articles with funder requirements for open access publishing (e.g., from the Research Council of Norway and the EU), it is especially important to meet these requirements, either through UiO's Rights Retention Policy or the funders' own Rights Retention Strategies.
The cost for publishing in fully open access journals (in contrast to traditional subscription journals) of Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis will still be covered.
UiO’s Open Access Publishing agreements website is continuously updated with information about the various agreements.
Access to Articles
UiO and OUS will continue to have access to a large portion of these publishers' articles through archiving rights. Many articles are also published openly on publishers' websites, or in institutional repositories.
Students and staff at UiO and OUS can search for literature as usual, preferably in Oria, or get helpful tips on our help page for finding and accessing electronic articles.
New Agreements in Place
A new Publish and Read Agreement for Springer Compact for a three-year period has recently been reached. During the fall, such agreements have also been finalized with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Sage, and the American Chemical Society, among others.
About the Negotiations
Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research, negotiates publishing agreements together with the negotiation council, which consists of representatives from BOTT (the universities of Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, and Tromsø), other higher education institutions, health enterprises, and the Joint Arena for Research Institutes.
Immediate open access to scientific articles is a goal both nationally and at UiO. Publish and Read Agreements have been, and continue to be, important means of achieving this goal. New agreements with major academic publishers are negotiated based on common goals for open access to scientific articles within economically sustainable frameworks.