2024 marks the first year for centralised open access agreements in Romania. While preparation and discussions began some time ago, it is only now that Romanian researchers will have the ability to publish their work open access through transformative agreements, such as the one recently negotiated between IOP Publishing and the Association of Romanian Universities, Research & Development Institutes and Central University Libraries, otherwise known as Anelis Plus.
We spoke to Professor Luminita Silaghi-Dumitrescu, President of Anelis Plus and a renowned professor in the Department of Chemistry at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania about what it means to have this agreement in place.
“Our consortium is committed to open access, and we have prepared a strategy and detailed Action Plan for National Open Access to Scientific Information. Our plan is aligned with financial support from the Ministry of Education in Romania which has become available this year. For us, supporting open access publishing is becoming even more important as there is growing physics research output in Romania, and it is that, along with the high quality and reputation of IOPP journals which led us to select IOP Publishing as one of the first transformative agreement partners in the first year of our action plan. We hope that authors will be stimulated to publish their work with IOP Publishing as our transformative agreement makes publishing open access easier for them. Our transformative agreement is an unlimited agreement with no barriers or caps as to how much research can be made openly available. We expect that this will have a positive impact on the reach of Romanian research in the physical sciences.”
When asked how authors and librarians in Romania have been prepared for this change, Professor Silaghi says: “Authors have been informed over a long period of time. In the last three years we have raised awareness about the possibility to have transformative agreements, in workshops, awareness events and in meetings with our specialists and researchers.”
“To inform and engage researchers and librarians, we’ve also organised a series of events, called ‘Awareness Days’. We ran these sessions across Romania, from Bucharest and Timisoara, through to Lasi and Cluj Napoca. Events like this have led to a wide participation and understanding of open access in Romania. We believe that raising awareness is important because the concept of open access is not fully embraced by the whole scientific community. However, through the programme of workshops and events, the number of researchers willing to publish open access is increasing. I’m excited for the future of open science for Romania as it is for everywhere in the world. The idea that everybody has access to the scientific results no matter the money available is inspiring.”
You can find out more about the IOP Publishing agreement with Anelis Plus here.
