Aries Systems Corporation

Implementing and growing Open Access Publishing programs represents alternative publishing options for authors, and new revenue streams for publishers.  For this reason, the OA market was recently estimated to be growing at 10-15% annually, representing between three and six percent of the total journals market.

Integrations of workflow tools, such as Editorial Manager® with Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink® for Open Access, are successfully simplifying the potential logistical hurdles associated with payment, tracking and reporting of APCs. Integrated solutions like this one streamline the workflows for all stakeholders because they leverage standardized metadata capture at submission. Capturing ORCID iDs, Ringgold identifiers, and Open Funder Registry identifiers at the time of submission allows calculation of accurate APC estimates at submission, and then again at acceptance, taking in to account institutional and funder-based discounting and license requirements.

Going even further, later this year RightsLink for OA will roll out the Institutional Tool Set. This new capability represents a suite of e-commerce tools which again leverages standard metadata to create a rules-driven author, institution and funder-centric payment workflows, and provide post-transaction reporting on pricing and discounts.

This will be helpful, for example, for authors submitting work from a university who has negotiated an offsetting arrangement or special billing arrangement with a publisher. In this case, there are three actors: the institution, the publisher and the author.

The author can choose to seek funding from his institution or pay directly. The publisher, in this case, as a result of the adoption of the tool, would offer aggregated invoicing and an approval workflow for institutions and funders who need to approve transactions before they show up.  Authors would receive notification of funding approval or denial with options to pay from a different funding source.  All parties would see detailed transaction reporting from a single source.

From this example, it’s clear that academic societies and commercial publishers alike are empowered by this solution to support their internal needs, as well as those of their customers.

Read more about sustainable growth in the OA market in this recent blog post on The Bookseller.

Learn more about Aries’ integration of RightsLink for OA in our video library.

Jennifer Goodrich, Director of Product Management, RightsLink for OA at Copyright Clearance Center, also contributed to this post.