Last month the VSNU stared a campaign called Open Up to Open Access to not only promote Open Access, but also to increase the awareness of the fact that under the new agreements between many publishers and the VSNU, many researchers are able to publish their research open access and have their article process costs covered by the existing deals.

One researcher who has benefited from such a deal is Dr Thorbald van Hall. He shared the following:

It is rather bizarre that everybody in the field of scientific publications warmly welcomes the idea of ‘open access’, while nobody seem to bother about the enormous additional costs for the scientists. Contracts between the VSNU and publishers of scientific journals provide a great solution here. Such a contract with the prestigious Elsevier’s journal ‘Current Opinion of Immunology’ prevented billing a few thousand euro’s on our lab budget.

Dr Thorbald van Hall,
Department of Medical Oncology, Leiden University Medical Center

If you want to discover whether you could save money on APCs under one of our current deals, please check out our website or contact our Open Access librarian Michelle van den Berk. Our latest agreement is with Cambridge University Press, which will allow researchers of Dutch universities to publish in their Open Access publications without any additional costs to themselves. You can discover more about the agreement in the announcement on the library website.