How to publish Open Access transformative agreements at the SNS
The transformative agreements, managed by the Library (see the list), are contract formulae of varying types signed by institutions (often associates in consortiums) and international scientific editors whose main aim is the gradual shift from a traditional business model based only on subscriptions to read content to one that supports the publication of open access articles.
For more general information on how to publish Open Access at the SNS, visit the dedicated page.
The Scuola Normale, as it progressively adopts this type of agreements in the context of the negotiations conducted by the CARE-CRUI Group with academic editors, will no longer pay publishers solely to access the contents, but also to allow affiliated researchers (that is, the corresponding authors) to publish their own open access works in "hybrid" journals (subscription journals in which only some of the articles are open access) and, for some editors, also those in "gold open access" (completely in open access), making them permanently available to all.
The publication costs (APC - Article Processing Charges) will be entirely included in the contractual fee, hence no added costs will be borne by the individual authors.
There will be no pre-established distribution of the APCs for publishing in open access among the member institutions: the fees will progressively diminish until the number available at a national level runs out.
All researchers of the SNS (professors, researchers, research fellows, PhDs, etc.) who are corresponding authors of the articles proposed for publication and who have a formal relationship with the SNS can publish in open access in the context of signed transformative agreements.
The corresponding author is the author who is responsible for submitting the article and following the entire publication process, authorized to act as a contact with the publisher on behalf of any co-authors.
The Creative Commons CC-BY license is generally applied to articles published with open access, as part of the signed transformative agreements (with the exception of some individual titles that require a CC BY NC license), and the copyright remains with the author.
Authors wishing to publish in a hybrid journal not included in a transformative agreement are advised not to pay any APCs requested by the publisher but to self-archive the permitted version of their work in an open access institutional or disciplinary archive, verifying the publisher's policy relating to open access to the SHERPA/RoMEO database or by contacting the Research Assessment and Open Science Service (svr@sns.it).
The workflow envisaged by the various publishers for the corresponding author for open access publication has some common characteristics.
Affiliation: the corresponding author's affiliation mechanism with their own institution is activated within the platform set up by the publisher for managing the submission, review and acceptance process of the articles by entering the SNS and their institutional email address in their own profile (@ sns.it)./p>
Acceptance of agreement: once the peer review phase has been completed, the publisher notifies the corresponding author that an agreement has been stipulated with the SNS thanks to which it is possible to publish the article with open access without incurring any additional cost and the latter is therefore invited to choose whether or not to agree to the proposal.
Choice of license: in the case of acceptance, the corresponding author, through the platform specially prepared by the publisher, is guided in the choice of the license that will be applied to the open access publication of his article, usually a CC BY license.
Validation of the article: the publisher, through the CRUI or thanks to the automatic notifications of its platform, sends to the approval managers of the SNS (the technical contacts of the library who manage the agreement) a request for confirmation and validation of the affiliation in order to proceed with the publication of the article.
Publication of the article: the publisher sends the corresponding author a confirmation of the open access publication of the article.
The publishers with whom, to date, transformative agreements are stipulated are: