Nestled deep in the woods of Zoom, there’s a special summer camp for publishers. It’s a place where campers can explore new activities, make meaningful connections, and gain valuable perspectives to bring back to their day-to-day work in open access (OA) publishing. We affectionately call it “Camp OA.”
For the second year in a row, CCC hosted a series of virtual “camp” meetups where RightsLink for Scientific Communications customers discussed transforming publishing models, technology, and workflows.
Here are some snapshots from Camp OA 2025:
1. Clearing New Paths (Exploring New Revenue Streams)
In a changing environment, forest management needs to keep up. Blazing new trails in the woods can offer many benefits, such as improved public health, economic development, and reduction of fire risk. However, to do so safely, you need the right equipment and a well-constructed plan.
Similarly, our campers explored potential new revenue streams off the beaten path to offset OA revenue pressures, leveraging CCC’s expertise and technology. With RightsLink Author Services, publishers can automate targeted offers for authors—including membership fees, figure charges, submission fees, research promotion such as infographics, and more—at key points across the publication lifecycle. Publishers can experiment, measure, and report on these optional offers to make data-driven business decisions.
Several of our campers were particularly interested in pioneering a path between their editorial and membership teams with RightsLink Author Services by offering new membership signups as part of the publication workflow.
2. Shopping at the Camp Store (Author Payment Options)
At summer camp, the camp store has something for everyone: bug spray, flashlights, and s’mores ingredients. But not all campers pay the same way—some pay in cash, others swipe a prepaid debit card, and the remainder draw from an account managed by their parents.
OA publishers also need to support a variety of funding models, fulfill arrangements with institutions and funders, and when fees need to be collected, provide multiple payment options for authors around the world . A recent survey of authors using RightsLink for Scientific Communications for their OA transactions revealed a strong desire for expanded payment options in China. This aligns with industry trends showing rapid growth in research output from Chinese authors.
In response to this increasing demand, this month, CCC announced a collaboration with China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation (CEPIEC) to integrate their SocoPay payment system with RightsLink. RightsLink now enables authors in China with a payment experience tailored to their needs, including mobile wallet payment options and Mandarin customer support.
In total, RightsLink now accepts up to eight currencies, as well as supporting a wide range of workflows, institutional agreements, and invoicing options.
At Camp OA, our campers discussed ways to improve their author experience by offering expanded, tailored payment options.
3. LEGO® Building (Agreement Modeling and Disambiguation)
Building a LEGO® project from a kit is predictable when all the pieces are accounted for and you have the instruction booklet. If you follow the instructions step-by-step using the right blocks, you can be confident your project will turn out as expected. But when you’re sifting through blocks from an assorted bin with no instructions, it’s a very different story—your project will be tedious and time-consuming with unpredictable results.
At Camp OA, our campers learned about the latest technology in automated affiliation disambiguation and deal modeling built by the OA experts at CCC: OA Intelligence. Like sorting through jumbled LEGO® bricks, many of our campers struggle to manually match authors with their institutions from incomplete or erroneous data. OA Intelligence does the sorting for you, using an AI-enabled matching process to connect authors to the right institutions with a high degree of confidence.
Once you’ve found the right blocks, it’s time to build your project—in this case, sustainable OA agreement offers. Like building without a set of instructions, publishers typically use Excel, a data visualization tool, or a DIY approach to build their OA offers—with inconsistent results that may leave money on the table. One camper compared the process to building a whole LEGO® wall, then realizing the kit came with a window that you didn’t make room for.
With the right instructions, building becomes much more efficient, repeatable, and transparent to institutional partners. OA Intelligence helps publishers optimize their deal modeling and produce scalable, consistent OA offers based on a validated set of publication data. Our automated technology enables “what-if” scenario planning, leveraging enriched article-level data to predict OA article outputs. Instead of a resource-intensive process, OA Intelligence recently helped one of our publishers build over 50 agreement offers in a matter of days.
Letters from Camp
As we enter autumn, we’re fondly looking back at our discussions around the campfire at Camp OA—an enjoyable and productive part of our collaboration with the scholarly communications community. Our campers sent us letters letting us know they valued the experience as well :
- “I love finding out what other people are doing/what suppliers are thinking about, in case it comes in useful down the line.”
- “[Camp OA] feels like a safe place to throw ideas around and refine them.”
- “[My favorite part was] hearing questions and comments from individuals from other organizations.”
We can’t wait until next summer, and hope to see you for the next Camp OA!