Jisc strikes 156-university deal with NAS

Jisc, the not-for-profit technology provider for education and research and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (NAS) have announced a two-year transformational open access (OA) pilot agreement. The ‘publish and read’ deal will allow UK corresponding authors at participating institutions to publish OA articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) without incurring any publication charges. Researchers at participating Jisc institutions will be able to access all PNAS content, dating back to 1915, for free.

The Jisc consortium, which consists of 156 UK universities, is the first national consortium to strike a transformational deal with the NAS.

Caren Milloy, director of licensing at Jisc, said: 'We are delighted to have secured an agreement with PNAS that reduces costs for our members and provides Plan S compliant open access publishing whilst giving them access to their journal. The agreement is further evidence of Jisc’s commitment to supporting society publishers in the transition to open access.'

Ken Fulton, PNAS publisher and NAS executive director, added: 'We are very pleased to have reached this pilot agreement with Jisc, which ensures that authors from UK universities have a Plan S–compliant route to open access publishing in PNAS. We look forward to analysing data from this pilot as we explore open access business models. We are also excited to launch our fully open access journal, PNAS Nexus, in 2022.'

The two-year pilot agreement, which runs from July 2021 until June 2023, enables immediate OA for UK higher education institutions and research organisations that opt in.   

Jisc Collections has already successfully negotiated similar deals with 15 small society publishers including the Microbiology Society, The Royal Society, and Portland Press.