New Year, New Form: Steering applicants through OASPA’s criteria

One of the goals of OASPA is to promote good ethics and best practices for Open Access of all shapes and sizes when disseminating scholarly communications. Applicants are judged against a set of OASPA Membership Criteria and all new applications undergo review by a Membership Committee to determine whether the applicant is following recognised industry standards, operating with integrity and is genuinely committed to open access publishing.

We regularly review our criteria and make improvements based on the experience we have gained. Recently we have evaluated our whole application process and have made the application form more clear and structured, with a strong emphasis on transparency. It is now also preceded by a checklist which runs through all of the key points applicants need to observe and then leads on to the form…

The application form itself also now provides a better guide to the information we are looking for on licensing requirements and fees, for example, and highlights other criteria points around which there is often confusion.

We hope that the new application form and the reworking of the criteria will help anyone interested in joining OASPA to understand what the requirements are and aid them in demonstrating best practices in these areas when they contact us. Simultaneously the information submitted in the form should provide OASPA with much more detailed information about the applicant from the outset which in turn we hope will speed up our review process.