Dutch universities push open-access publishing in Europe

Nature : Just before Christmas 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) announced an agreement with scholarly publisher Elsevier. According to the agreement, by 2018, 30% of Dutch papers in Elsevier journals to which the VSNU subscribes will be published as open access. A similar agreement has been in place with Springer since 2014, and in October 2015, a group of UK universities also reached an agreement with Springer for open access to papers with UK-based authors. Both the VSNU and the Dutch government hope to use the agreement to push other consortia toward open-access publishing agreements. Other European Union nations have limited open-access agreements or hybrid business-model agreements in which the journals collect subscriptions but let authors pay for specific articles to be open access. The Dutch and UK agreements are for immediate open access upon publication in contrast to the policy in the US, where open-access agreements allow the papers to be paywalled and to go open access only after a delay of 6–12 months.