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Interview

"A game changer for all parties, accelerating an equitable transition to OA"
Wayne Manos, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Rob O’Donnell, Rockefeller University Press

To learn more about how the OA Switchboard can help a journal publisher to support their Open Access goals, we recently talked to Wayne Manos, Director of Product Development and Marketing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and Rob O’Donnell, Senior Director of Publishing at Rockefeller University Press. Both publishers offer a combination of hybrid and Open Access (OA) journals and are committed to OA. Both publishers are actively pursuing transformative licensing agreements with institutions all over the world.

Levelling the playing field in a challenging time for smaller publishers and university presses

They agree that this is a challenging time right now, especially for smaller publishers and university presses. Negotiating OA deals and then producing reports for various stakeholders (libraries, funders, and management) is a time-consuming process, as is creating the infrastructure for a smooth and compliant author experience. Moreover, editorial submission systems and subscription fulfilment systems are not built to manage the hybrid world we now live in, and so time and investment in systems are needed and be can formidable.

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Wayne commented, “The OA Switchboard helps level the playing field for us. Previously, the staff and technical resources needed to deliver detailed author and publication metadata to our institutional clients were a significant hurdle for many scientific society and independent publishers. As we look forward to changing the business model of our research publications from hybrid to fully OA, it gives publishers a simple, standardized infrastructure to exchange data with all relevant stakeholders. The ability to do this programmatically via a trusted, independent system is a vital component in streamlining our discussions with research institutions and funders. It means we can ditch the manual production of spreadsheets, and it allows our customers to access the data when and how they want it. The time savings for all parties is significant, and the transparency is crucial.”

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