Open access best practices include:
Publication agreement: prior to publication, after acceptance of the manuscript, the author has to sign a publishing agreement consistent with open access principles.
Copyright: the author retains copyright of the published work without an exclusive assignment of rights. The author grants the publisher a nonexclusive use license to distribute the work, and at the same time all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work under the terms of Creative Commons licenses.
Open Access licensing: one of the most widely used Creative Commons licenses that allows broad freedom of use is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). The CC-BY 4.0 license allows unlimited reuse of content to increase the dissemination and impact of the work, subject to proper attribution of authorship of the work. This license allows readers to share any part of the work in any medium and format, modify it for any purpose, including commercial, provided proper credit is given to the author, changes made to the work are indicated, and a link to the license URL is provided. Creative Commons licenses are modular user licenses that can combine the main permissions related to a published content and can easily be adapted to the communication and dissemination needs of research products.
The four main permissions are:
Combining the four basic (BY-SA-NC-ND) permissions results in six licenses to which is added the public domain license:CC0
Transformative agreements, negotiated mainly between consortia, libraries, and publishers, are intended to facilitate a shift from contracts that require subscriptions to access content, to contracts in which publishers are remunerated for publishing in Open Access, without further payment. In a nutshell, costs for journal subscriptions are transformed into costs for publishing scholarly articles by authors belonging to the academic institution; thus authors will no longer be required to pay so-called Article Processing Charges (Apc).
In principle, these contracts cover so-called "hybrid journals" in which there are simultaneously open access articles and articles that are visible only upon payment of a subscription. The new agreements should facilitate the transition to Open Science and enable the conversion of journals from "hybrid" to "gold open access."
Read more about the transformative agreements signed by the University of Florence.
CRUI Care has signed some of these contracts on behalf of Italian universities.
ESAC publishes a registry on the transformative agreements that have been made between publishers and consortia.