 Welcome, everyone. I believe we are on time now to start our webinar. Let me introduce myself first. My name is Rodrigo Silva. I'm the communications manager at Koji Tati Press. We have organized this webinar in the context of the International Open Access Week 2023. This year's motto is community over commercialization. And we wanted, of course, to introduce to our audience, to the world, Koji Tati Press institutional membership program. So this is the structure of the webinar that we have ahead of us. We're heading for more or less an hour. I'll start by presenting, as I said, institutional membership program at Koji Tati. So where do we come from, where we are at now and possible steps for the future? And then we will be hearing from three speakers, three representatives from three institutions that have been longtime members of Koji Tati Press. We welcome Louise Otting from TU Delft in the Netherlands, Sena Toivola from Givas Gila University in Finland, and Agata Gebert from Gises in Germany. I would like, first of all, of course, to welcome our speakers to the event. I'll give a little bit of introduction to our speakers before they go. So let's start our event. I will now share my screen with you. And for those who don't know, I would like to start with a bit of context about Koji Tati Press for those who don't know. So Koji Tati Press was born in 2014. OK, so we are a fully open access journal publisher with four journals all in the field of social sciences, as you can see. Media and communication, politics and governance, social inclusion and urban planning. A fifth journal is to be launched very soon in 2024-2025 in the field of Ocean and Society. As you can see, we are a very small open access publisher, although well established with less than 10 years. Since we are here to introduce Koji Tati Press institutional membership model, I think it's important for us to start first with the financial context, so the financial background at Koji Tati, so that we can then jump ahead. So an important information that you have to know in advance is that we at Koji Tati Press, we have no private or public funder behind, which influences, of course, our financing model, which is based currently in two pillars. An article processing charge for every accepted manuscript for publication and the institutional membership membership program. So right from the offset in 2014, we realized that this article processing charge model would itself pose like a challenge and obstacle for many researchers worldwide to access funding to publish an article with us. As we all know, there is an imbalance worldwide, a geographical imbalance and imbalance per field of study when it comes to access to open access funding. And we knew that this would limit the access of many high quality researchers to publish their research fully open access in our journals at Koji Tati Press. And so we launched this institutional membership program right from the beginning again, 2014, that goes as follows. The institutions that are members pay a flat fee in the beginning of each year and all the affiliated researchers can publish fully open access in all our journals without incurring article processing charges. From the feedback that we receive, of course, from authors, we know I know that we have some researchers in our audience today. This is beneficial for all the agents, for the authors, because it allows them to focus only on the quality of the research without having to worry about open access fund publications, bureaucracies concerning their European projects, etc. And for the libraries as well, the main target of today's webinar, because it actually simplifies the process. There is a single payment in the beginning of the year. And as I sometimes joke with this, but it's true, you only listen, you will only hear from us again in the beginning of the next year for the renewal of the membership. And in the meantime, throughout the year, there is no paperwork and no bureaucracy involved. So this is in a nutshell how the institutional membership program at Koji Tati works. Let's look at some numbers now to know where we stand. So as I said before, and have I shown in the last in the last slides, of course, the growing quality of the journals, the optimization of the editorial process throughout the year has led to an exponential growth of our members, considering that we are less than 10 years old. I remember when I started working in Koji Tati Press in back in 2016 as managing editor, we had only four institutional members. And today we have 84 members from all over the world. You can see the top three by country in the in the slide. But I would like you to take a special attention to the last point that I had in the slide. So it is important to note that most of the members, the majority of the members, they see an actually an increase in the number of publications after signing a membership with us. This happens, for example, with T.U. Delft or Gizis, that whose representatives are here today. That happens is two of the examples. I know that in the audience, we have colleagues from, for example, Tvent or IO University. This happens the same with them as well for your information. And this information, this increase in the number of publications after the membership is important for two reasons. First of all, as I said before, it alleviates the financial pressure on the libraries since they do not incur in APCs. But the membership also serves as an opportunity for affiliated researchers to publish more and more high quality research in our journals, democratizing the system. So making it more accessible for everyone. So it's important to so it opens the door without any financial constraints to more researchers. So it's important to focus on the opportunity as well in the future for the membership, for the researchers of the member institutions, but where we are at now. I mean, some of you might be asking, yes, but how much you might be asking? Let us look at the numbers now to know where we where we stand. So this is where we are today, even in our membership. We made an effort to make a fair offer of membership for universities with different sizes, from different geographies, because actually financially sustainable does not mean the same for everyone. OK, so this is currently the cost of our institutional membership, which is divided by the number of people in the institution and the human development index. We did not invent this model. Some other institutions use this this formula. And now that we have taken a quick look at the numbers, I would like you all to pay special attention to the cost of the article processing charge per per except article for publication. So by comparing the number, it is clear that by the second accepted article, the institutional membership is already more beneficial in terms of financing. OK, and this happens with many universities that are with us today in the audience. This happens. There are also others that whose researchers collaborate with us very regularly, but haven't joined the institutional program might benefit from it, for example. So it's clear that by the second article, the membership becomes financially more sustainable for the institutions. I did not want to put the link here, but I will paste very shortly in the chat the link to more information about the membership where you can see all the members, you can see all these numbers again. So some of source some sources for you to consult. Let's look at the future now. OK, so where do we. So what's the next steps for the future? Where are we heading? So as I said before, the growing quality of the journals, the feedback we've been receiving. Actually makes the publisher confident on the rising number of new members within the next years, as the list is actually updated regularly. The desired outcome in the future would be would be a scenario that we had a sufficient number of members that would allow us to make submissions APC free to all authors being from a member or not. So this means sustaining the editorial process only with membership support and abandoning the APC model altogether. Of course, this is a long term strategy, a long term look, which would also imply perhaps a shift in the way some libraries, some funders, for example, look at supporting open access initiatives like the ones we have, for example, focusing more on the sustainability of the model, the benefits for authors and readers. Again, as I said before, the opportunities for new collaborations, for more submissions, for more quality research, financial transparency, issues of financial transparency, which we pride ourselves in and focus, for example, less on how many articles were published by their authors only as the single factor to decide whether to subscribe to membership or not. This is, in a nutshell, I'm getting close to my time. I would like to listen also to our speakers. So let me just wrap my presentation up, OK? So question of the process, as I said, we have this institutional membership model as an alternative financing model to the article processing charges, and we have at this right from our offset in 2014. So this is a model with growing interest from both the authors and the libraries, which is proven by the exponential growth of the number of our members in nine years. And this growing interest is because the system, the model is more financially sustainable. It's much simpler in terms of paperwork. It's transparent and, of course, contributes to a fairer publishing landscape. I have given my email here for everyone who wants in the next few days to follow up by email or follow us on LinkedIn. I am available to clarify any questions you have in the in the next few days for follow up, and I am terminating my presentation now because I'm pretty sure some questions are rising. We want to listen from our speakers, and I will start by introducing our first speaker, Louis Otting. Again, thank you. Louis is the collection manager of TU Delft, the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Louis negotiates with publishers about subscriptions and publications, manages the collection budget and open access funds and heads also the collections team. Louis and the colleagues offer several services to support researchers and staff at TU Delft in practicing open science and publishing the research output in a sustainable way. And as open as possible. So without further delay, Louis, the floor is yours. If you can make it in your mind. Thank you very much. I'm trying to share my screen now. But as these things go, they always give some glitches once it's most important. I'll try again to share it. If everything's great, you should see my presentation now. Could you give me a thumbs up? If that's still the desktop. That's quite annoying. We'll try again. Yes, now we can see. Here it is. Wonderful. So my name is Louise Otting. I'm indeed working at Delft University of Technology. And it's been a very steep learning curve. My background is from the public libraries. And since about three years, I'm now working at an academic library. Also, my information is in this first slide as well. Should anyone have questions later on, feel free to contact me through email or through LinkedIn. I've been asked to tell a little bit more about the challenges we have as a library, but also what is happening here? The challenges we have as a library, but also concerning publications, of course. So one thing we are very proud of at our universities that we have managed to get a very high percentage of open access publications. This is helped very much by the situation in the Netherlands where we have a law that allows us to retain the rights to short scientific works. And after an embargo of six months, we can make those articles, those short scientific works available through our repository. So this is indeed why we were able to crick up that percentage in open access to our research output. Of course, we are also looking in other ways to be as open as possible and to practice open science. And as a library and as someone who manages the budgets, it's very difficult to make this sustainable. We see an enormous rise in the cost of article processing charges that are not in any way related to a rise in the number of people working here or in the number of articles that are being published. There's a disconnect somewhere there. And we are doing our best to make this as transparent as possible and to negotiate with publishers and try to find more sustainable ways of working together. So we need to track and forecast budgets. And as you can imagine something like this membership program, it's very helpful because it has a very clear cost that you can predict that you can rely upon. With the system where we pay per publication, we see that the APC prices can be all over the place and that sometimes even during agreements, the prices change significantly, which makes it very difficult to get that budget under control. So this is one of the reasons that we are very happy with this model. But as you can see as well, if you look at the dark blue and the light blue combined, because in the dark blue there's quite a lot of open access costs as well, the cost rise significantly throughout the years. And we do not see an end to this rise at the moment. We see several concerns within the publishing landscape, financial I've already touched upon. But also in the well-being of our researchers, the publish or perish is real and is felt by many of our researchers. The stresses are very high. And this is because it's become for publishers, it's become a model for profit. So they sometimes put even more pressure upon our researchers to keep publishing, publishing, publishing, because that'll bring down the profit that they are looking for. So it's not just a financial concern that we have, but it's also an innovation in the well-being of our researchers in the efficiency. Sometimes time is very important for other articles that might be less important, but now the pace and the quality is mostly in control of the publishers. And if there is no sense of community or of direct personal connections, then it can be difficult if those ideas are different from each other. And of course, morally as well, we feel that the world faces many big challenges and in order to face them, we will need to share research output with each other so that we can build on each other's output and find solutions for these challenges. We try to create more awareness with our authors, with our researchers. We created a dashboard, for example, to show them a little bit more on the publication costs and also on the options that they have. And as you can see, Kojitajo has a very high citation in our dashboard to a low cost. So this is some of the places where we say, look into this if this is a rise venue for you to publish. This is something that we'd like to promote to our researchers. They can filter down on these dashboards to see within their field what their peers are publishing and where they lie upon the high or low cost, the high or low citations. And we hope to add a lot more alternative metrics to these as well. So we'll keep extending this dashboard. There is a link, if someone would like to have a look and see what it looks like, I'll make this available to you all. But this has helped authors become more aware because most of the costs are being borne by the library, so they often don't have a real feel of what's happening. And it's good that we can, that those publishers that we have a good relationship with and that we feel aligned with our open access values can become more visible in this way as well. So where we have our concerns in the publication landscape, we also see that this membership program actually has an answer to some of those challenges. So we see that they're very stable and predictable costs that make it more sustainable to publish open access. We see a big willingness to collaborate with us and we see that he has a strong open access vision that aligns with our vision for open access. And also it relieves the stress from the researchers that they're being pushed to publish more for more profits because the cost is stable. It doesn't matter if they publish three papers or eight papers, they do publish more but that's because they have a very good experience and they can publish at their pace when they need it because the early release of the articles is also mentioned by our researchers as something that they are very happy with. And of course the emphasis on the quality, not on the growth, we see some other models where you get an enormous rise in the number of titles and in the costs that the quality goes down and we see that at this publisher this remains very stable and that it's community driven if there are new titles being added and it's being done very carefully and not 50 titles per year for example. So that gives us as a library a lot of trust as well that we can collaborate with this program and that we can keep supporting this program. The freedom to share reuse and use at all stages of the version of the article is also a very strong point in our opinion. Which makes it a very good collaboration. Researchers are happy. We see an increase in publishing. They mentioned that it is because of their good experiences and from the library point of view we are very happy as well. So we would definitely recommend looking into this model. Thank you. Thank you, Louise, for the presentation. I remind the audience that they are free to ask questions in the Q&A format. Share some comments in the chat if you are free to. If I bid my job right, you are all able to do so. We're going to be listening now to our second speaker, Senna Toivola. Senna is an information specialist at the operation at the Open Science Center at the University of Givaskilla in Finland. And Louise, Senna specializes in open access publishing support. And Senna, the floor is yours. Thank you, Rodrigo. And happy Open Access Week to everyone. I'm going to share my screen. I hope you can see it now. Here we go. Yeah. So yes, my name is Senna Toivola and I work as an information specialist at the Open Science Center of the University of Givaskilla, Finland. We are located in central Finland. And this year we are celebrating the 160-year history of the university. We have six faculties covering diverse disciplines. And I myself represent the Open Science Center that is a unit consisting of the University Library and University Museum. And among library and museum services and science education, we provide a wide range of open science and research services on publishing, research, data management, responsible metrics and open education. The Open Science Center has been an active promoter of open science for more than a decade now. Our publishing policy emphasizes the importance of open science and it sets guidelines for publishing at the university. For example, it is required that all research publications are self-archived in the university's digital repository. We do encourage researchers to choose open access journals for their papers if suitable and affordable options are available. The university complies with the Finnish Declaration for Open Science and Research and is committed to make all scientific publications open. So what are the main challenges that we are facing when it comes to open access funding? We have identified two significant problems. Similar to those that Louise introduced, they are research evaluation and the prevailing culture in scientific publishing. And the increasing costs. To provide some background on the topic, I'll tell you a bit about the Finnish Publication Channel classification system called the Publication Forum. It is a rating system that is used to evaluate the quality of journals and publication channels are evaluated by panels. And each panel is formed by discipline-specific experts. They use a three-level classification to rate publication channels, three being the highest level and two leading level. Zero indicates that the publication channel doesn't meet some of the criteria of level one, which is called basic level. The Publication Forum classification plays an important role in the funding model of Finnish universities. The universities receive funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture and a portion of their core funding is determined by the number and quality of publications they produce. The quality of publications is assessed using these publication forum levels. And this brings us to the first significant challenge associated with OA funding. Open publishing does not reward researchers enough. They have the pressure to publish in order to maintain a position in the academic community. The more you publish, the better if you get your papers accepted in top journals, even better. So researchers tend to prefer high-impact journals. And in the Finnish context, journals that have been rated level two or three by Publication Forum. And these journals often are either not open access or they charge expensive publishing fees. And as long as the funding model and research evaluation are based on journal-based metrics, this won't change. And that is why we have to direct attention towards responsible researcher evaluation. The other major challenge in open access funding is money, of course, and according to the latest monitoring, Finnish research organisations spent over 21 million euros on transformative agreements and over 4 million euros on separate APCs and BPCs on publications that the agreements did not cover. And this is quite a lot for a relatively small country like Finland. And Finnish organisations agree that the current cost level is unsustainable. So these are the topics we are struggling with. And next I'm going to talk about the membership programme. We've been a member for five years now. And media and communication and social inclusion are the two journals that researchers from the University of Yvaskylä have published in. We have 12 articles and a book review. And our researchers have worked as editors as well. Not all researchers have funding for publication fees. And Koshitatio offers potential publishing channels for them. And I'm one of the team members responsible for answering researchers questions regarding open access publishing. And in my experience, they have been very few inquiries from researchers concerning the membership. And I take that as a good sign. The other workflow seems uncomplicated. And compared to all the effort our transformative read and publish agreements require, almost no administration is needed. We don't have to verify our researchers' affiliations or approve article requests. And it saves us time. We appreciate that articles are published under a CC by license. And thanks to the license, the final published versions of articles can be self-archived into our institutional repository. Finally, I contacted a couple of researchers that have published under the agreement. And the feedback was very positive, as you can see. The authors pointed out things like good collaboration, excellent communication, clear author guidelines, streamlined publishing process and high quality reviews. And last but not least, not having to take care of APCs. It's very nice to hear that our researchers have been dissatisfied with the membership. And so are we at the Open Science Center. So thank you. Thank you, Sena, for the presentation. We are also very happy to hear the feedback from the researchers at Give Us Killer, of course. We will now jump to the final speaker. I got to Givert. I got to start at her career as a co-editor of a scientific journal and gain some experience in medium-sized publishing houses. Since 2009, she works in the area of Open Access, being responsible for the biggest repository for the social sciences SSR. She has the team library and Open Access at Gises, Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Next to Lassem Singh, she advises the staff at Gises on their publication strategy. I got, if you could unmute as well, the mic for the presentation. Sorry, you can see my, I still have to do the presentation. Yes, we can see it. But you see those, and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Thank you very much for the introduction. I'd like to add, actually, I'm also at the moment head of the whole department, Knowledge Exchange and Transfer, which had three teams. That's the team publication, the team training, and the team library and Open Access. And I'm responsible for assigning an open science strategy to the whole institute of five different departments, which encloses Open Access, Open Data, Open Methodology, and Open Source for the software development. Now, I'll give you a short introduction into Gises as such, and then I come to an end the conclusion of why we participate in Koshy Tazio's institutional membership program. Now, Gises and relevant numbers, we are very small, compared to all the universities that have been presenting. We have five research departments. Oh, first of all, let me tell you, we are an institute of the Leibniz Association in Germany. Now, Germany has four different research organizations. The Leibniz Association holds institutes about 100 that provide infrastructure services to their respective communities. So the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Gises would offer infrastructure to the social sciences. We have five research departments, about 218 publishing scientists. We publish about 150 journal articles a year, 45 in hybrid Open Access, rising because of the transformative agreements, 25 in genuinely open access journals, and about one to three articles in the four Koshy Tazio's journals. There might be one a year, there might be three, there might be none a year too. When it comes to Open Access at Gises, we have two objectives. One is to encourage our staff to publish Open Access, but also offering Open Access publication possibilities. But at the same time as an infrastructure institute, we need to encourage changes in the relevant publication systems in our communities. Now, Gises started in 2018 by offering a disciplinary repository, which is so far the biggest repository for the social sciences in the field, and offers services for self-archiving, but is also turning into a publication platform for Diamond Open Access. In 2012, we introduced our first Open Access policy that provided advice, funding, and infrastructure services to our staff to publish Open Access. In 2019, as everybody else, we started with the big transformative agreement and deals that have so far opened a lot of publication options in the hybrid journals, but whereas frankly speaking, these agreements do very little impact on the Open Access transformation in our fields as the flipping that was promised with the transformative agreements doesn't actually take place. We also encourage and other initiatives, engage in other initiatives of which Coach Itachiou's institutional membership program is one main feature. Through Coach Itachiou, we enable and encourage our staff to publish Open Access in genuinely open access journals beyond the hybrid journals of the big publishers. By paying a yearly membership fee, we also pay less money for the articles as we would if we would pay APCs. But I come back to close this up. We also engage in Koala, which is a consortia that fosters collaborative funding for open access journals and book series by academic libraries, research institutions and associations, and provides also provides an alternative to the dominant APC model where articles are paid for individually by authors and the institutions. And the last thing is we also engage in Enable. Enable is a joint together of publishers, libraries, book traders, repositories, and other stakeholders to engage in cooperative open access publishing. Now to sum this up, and this really is my last slide, but it's important to sum it up why we participate in Coach Itachiou's membership program. It enables us to offer our staff to publish comfortably in four open access journals with no individual APCs. But it also enables us to offer an open access publication option in a small and medium-sized publishing house that is still very important to the social sciences and humanities. Thus we contribute to the necessary publication diversity that threatens to get lost with the big deals of the transformative agreements and foster open access transformation in the publishing sector in the social sciences and humanities all together. So beyond ensuring comfortable and less expensive publication options for our staff at GIZIS, we also contribute to a fair, sustainable, and diverse publication system in the social sciences. Thank you very much. Thank you. I got for this presentation as well. We have reached the end of the presentations. I have a question here that seems has been answered, but I will make a quick follow-up as well on the question that was answered. The audience can still make some questions if they want, and our speakers are always free as well to cut me off and make and ask questions to each other as well. We have a question here. I'm going to read it because this webinar is recorded and people, when they watch it after, it's important to know what the answer was, the question was. So the question is, is it only institutional membership that is provided? What about personal or group membership? This is because there is a possibility that an institution might not show interest in registering or might take a long time to decide. I will follow up on this with two different ways, although the answer is always no. We do not have person or group membership. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes after the interest shown by an author to subscribe to the membership, the institution is either not interested or takes a long time to decide, depending on the internal processes that go. Alternatively, what we do sometimes to overcome a little bit this problem is to sign the membership either with an institute inside the university, for example, or a department because sometimes they have also the funds to make these kind of memberships. However, our preference is always the institution as a whole, as it opens more opportunities for more people and not some departments or institutes inside. The second idea is, we do not have personal or group memberships because this would put the focus of the finding in the researcher as a person. We do not want to do that. So our idea is to have the collaboration with the institutions as a whole to allow the researchers, as I said before, to focus only on the research and not having to deal with financial bureaucracies with the publisher. This is how I would answer it. I believe we have no more questions. So I think we have these three presentations, which were very useful to complement my presentation in the way that we have three different geographies, three different sizes, a little bit more or less common challenges though, which is important. I believe speakers and I will be able to some follow-up after this. Some final information before we close the webinar. So a recording will be available for everyone to watch. So we will notify all the participants when the video is on. I am available to clarify any questions by email, as I said before. If you have in the meantime in the next days, then while closing, of course, the server will pop up. Let us know what you thought if you want. It's not mandatory if you liked the webinar, if it was useful, if it was clarified or not. And I would like to, again, thanks to Louise, Sena and Agata for being here today and of course to our audience for being with us today. Thank you very much. Well, do we go there? Actually, one more question in the FNA section. They're asking about how, what Kokchitatsu's viewpoint is when it comes to peer review and publishing research data related to the article. The vision does. Yeah. Thank you. Question. Your vision is that I've come to abandon this much. Regarding more open exercise prices, where it's got just a viewpoint when it comes to open peer review and publishing should be related to the article. Okay. So in the question that you press, we only publish research articles that have not been published elsewhere. For now, we only use a double blind peer review. There is no intention for now, no plan for now to change this model that has been working with a high quality insight. So we have several ways to also guarantee, of course, that this peer review is well done. Something that we can perhaps think in the future, but for now it's not in our plans. Thank you, Agata. I've completely missed it. So again, thank you everybody. Thank you, Louise, Sena and Agata. We'll be in touch, everyone. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you.