Friends: Non-disclosure agreements librarians and consortia managers sign with publishers are immoral. Especially when we are investing taxpayers' money. Every consortium in India should reveal how much they have spent so far on journal subscriptions - in great detail. Received from a friend. Hi all: The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has released an Open Access Monitoring Report 2013-2015: http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/Monitoringbericht_Open_Access_2015... The OA status of 17'000 publications reported to be output of SNSF funded projects published between 2013 and 2014 an have been checked, and an OA share of at least 39% (or 56% if you also count freely papers on websites, but not repositories as green OA) was found. This validated OA ratio is much higher, than what authors have self declared in the grant administration system to be Open Access (20%). Also financial reports of grants have been checked for publications related costs. These costs have not been categorized separately in the grant administration system and therefore no specific data was available until now. The check revealed that the uptake of APCs is still quite moderate, despite the SNSF has started in 2013 to pay explictly APCs up to 3000 CHF during the grant lifetime. The check also revealed that hybrid OA articles were funded, although that’s not in line with the SNSF regulations. For the future a more rigorous control system will be established to prevent paying for hybrid OA. Further it was also noted, that a significant amount of costs were attributed to publication costs not related to Open Access, like overlength charges, color charges or author's contributions. These charges no longer appear to be appropriate and are likely to be covered on a much more restrictive basis in future. It was also announced that the SNSF together with swissuniversities (the association of all Swiss Universities) has commissioned a study „Financial flow analysis of scientific publishing in Switzerland“. The mandate was awarded to Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA), in collaboration with Professor John Houghton, Melbourne. The results are expected to be in by the end of the year and should lead to specific action. See: http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/Finanzflussanalyse_e.pdf Additionally, a Swiss court has ruled recently, that accepted non-disclosure agreements in contracts with publishers can’t annul the local transparency law. So in the specific case, the University of Geneva had to disclose what they have been paying to Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. Here the decision of the court (in French): https://wisspub.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/2016-02-29-decision-cour-de-just... Best Regards Christian Gutknecht Also, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, law requires one to make all agreements with publishers public. We should persuade our Members of Parliament to bring about such a law. Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.