b-on assured until 2021

FCT has guaranteed another cycle of subscriptions to the international scientific journals of the online knowledge library - b-on, which will run from 2019 to 2021.

The results of the negotiations with the 16 content providers involved guaranteed a set of relevant conditions for the scientific community: all previous collections are maintained and there is an increase of content in four publishers (Annual Reviews, IEEE, Institute of Physics and Wiley). Additionally, for the first time, Open Access clauses were introduced in some contracts: there are now eight publishers fully aligned with the FCT open access rules, and with several publishers it was possible to negotiate discounts or exemptions from the article processing charges (APC) - details will soon be announced on the b-on website.

b-on centralizes nationally the subscription of tens of thousands of scientific journals, reducing costs and ensuring that public institutions in the area of science and higher education have access to scientific publications, which are essential to the teaching and research community.

In the negotiations with the content providers, the FCT had a technical advisory group for the negotiations that included members of CRUP, CCISP and APESP, to whom it is grateful. It was thus possible to achieve the goals of reconciling the right to read with the right to publish in open access, cost containment, maintenance and expansion of all the contents made available until then.