We stand for Open Access

What does this look like and mean in terms of policy and practice?

STM will work with stakeholders to create sustainable pathways that ensure authors are able to make their Version of Record Open Access.

STM will engage in— and  facilitate—community  and stakeholder collaborations to ensure research integrity.

STM will continue to innovate and invest in the technologies, systems and practices that enable excellence  and integrity.

STM will continue to  support the adoption of  Open Research practices to encompass  the open sharing of other research outputs  (beyond the final article).

STM does not endorse Rights Retention Strategies or Green OA with no embargo.

 

The drill down | How our position is exhibited in action

WHY

  • Knowledge-creation, discovery and sharing is best enabled when the final articles resulting from all stages of the peer-review and
    publication process are immediately openly available to all.
  • The VoR is the most thoroughly vetted version of the research publication, having been through all stages of the peer-review and
    publication process. We know from author feedback that they prefer OA being to the VoR. A key feature of the VoR is that it is the version against which any future corrections (for a Corrected Version of Record) or enhancements
    (Enhanced Version of Record) will be made.

HOW

  • By urging funders and institutions to work with publishers to enable researchers to choose Gold OA to achieve OA to the VoR.
  • By monitoring the uptake of different routes to Open Access through the STM OA Dashboard

WHY

  • Research integrity is an issue that requires community-wide involvement to uphold.

HOW

  • Through the development of standards, tools and solutions to improve and  ensure the integrity of publications—regardless  of access model.
  • By engaging stakeholders  globally – to define and  build the critical infrastructure needed to  support open and trusted scholarly communications at scale.

WHY

  • This innovation and investment will only grow in importance as the corpus of research that comprises the academic record grows.

HOW 

  • Publishers invest heavily in the operation of peer review publication processes, curation and stewardship of the scholarly record at scale.

WHY 

  • These undermine the subscription model they are dependent upon and carry with them potential unintended consequences.
  • OA models that promote immediate open access to accepted manuscripts with zero embargoes are not viable for a majority of STM publishers.

WHY 

  • To strengthen trust and integrity in the final work and to speed up discovery.

HOW 

  • STM is committed to convening and working with stakeholders to further open research practices and to create a linked, interoperable, robust, and trustworthy scholarly record that encompasses preprints, research data, protocols, code, etc. All of these outputs, have their role and place within the  scholarly record, alongside the Version of  Record.
OA DASHBOARD

Open Access Data and the Publishing Industry | Key takeaways & trends in the data

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