How New Open Access Management Infrastructure is Unburdening the Researchers: Lessons Learned From a National Collaboration in Luxembourg

How can we navigate the complexities? The ultimate question. ChronosHub’s Head of Business Development, Martin Jagerhorn, introduced the session and underlined four aspects as key drivers in navigating through the complexities in the research ecosystem: best practices such as author-centric OA strategies and centralization of funds, all-round collaboration both internally and with external third parties, standardization to ensure a common understanding between all stakeholders, and, ultimately, automation.

At the session, Tom Jakobs elaborated on the OA journey for FNR. Before 2017, FNR had no OA policy and had faced multiple issues with, among other things, a substantial number of ineligible requests leading to long, painful processes due to researchers applying the wrong license, not paying attention to embargos, etc. Today, FNR has adopted a clear OA policy compliant with Plan S and integrated all funds into ChronosHub.

Now, everything begins with the author, who can easily search through journals that are compliant to FNR, find better overviews of who takes care of APCs, how much, etc. Data collection of both article meta-data and invoices has become automated. The same goes for all other processes at FNR, such as payment approvals, compliance checks, and automatic reporting back to FNR. Essentially, the risk of human errors at FNR has diminished tremendously.