OAC 2025 Professional case studies
OAC 2025 Professional · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The OAC 2025 Professional is a professional certification for people who run, support, or advise on open access and open science programmes - repository managers, scholarly communications librarians, research office and funder compliance staff, publishers, and consultants. It tests applied judgement across the whole open access workflow rather than memorised definitions, so expect questions that put you in a real decision: which licence to recommend when a funder and a journal disagree, how to handle a dataset deposit with incomplete metadata, or how to advise a researcher whose metrics-based promotion case depends on non-traditional outputs. The OAC 2025 Professional case studies are 5 cases and about 4,610 words.
1The Transformative Agreement Cap That Nobody Modelled
A consortium of 14 universities and three teaching hospitals in a small European country is negotiating its first read-and-publish agreement with a large commercial publisher. The offer runs three years and keeps access to 1,900 hybrid and 240 fully open titles.
954 words, about 5 min2The ND Map, the Museum Photograph and the Civil Servant Co-Author
An associate professor at a national research institute has an article accepted in a hybrid subscription journal. Her funder requires CC BY.
1,009 words, about 5 min3Minting Identifiers for a Legacy Repository Before the Domain Dies
A university repository with 22,000 records is migrating from a home-grown system to DSpace 7. Of these, 6,400 have no persistent identifier.
897 words, about 4 min4Four Q1 Papers or a Research Narrative?
A university senate is revising its promotion criteria. The draft requires candidates to list at least four publications in Q1 journals, defined by Scopus CiteScore quartile, within the past five years; a departmental committee will also compute a field-normalised citation percentile; candidates may attach a short research narrative.
851 words, about 4 min5The APC Fund That Ran Out in May
A university library's open access publishing fund of US 180,000 for the year was 78% spent by the end of May. Sixty-one percent went on 14 articles in three journals from one publisher, at APCs of US 3,900–4,600 each.
899 words, about 4 min