A Decade of Innovation and Collaboration
The open access (OA) movement has grown from a handful of journals in the early 2000s to encompass roughly half of research articles globally. CCC has been there as an innovative partner every step of the way.
In 2014, CCC introduced RightsLink for Scientific Communications in response to publishers’ challenges transitioning to OA, beginning with a single publisher. Over the past decade, CCC has developed and expanded the product in close collaboration with publishers, funders, institutions, consortia, and authors to become the market-leading solution.
Today, RightsLink:
- Is trusted by 30+ leading publishers, more than any other provider
- Is used to manage OA agreements between publishers and 2,000+ institutions and funders
- Automates OA agreement processes in nearly 70 countries
- Has processed over 46,000 funding requests under transformative or other OA agreements
- Represents 5,500+ journals
- Supports authors from 180+ countries to make their works openly available
In addition to its best-in-class technology, customers trust RightsLink as a flexible, interoperable, and scalable solution that addresses their most pressing needs in the automation of their OA business practices.
Over the past 10 years, here are 10 ways CCC has impacted scholarly publishing as it embraces an OA future:
Saw an emerging need for an OA payment solution and partnered with the publishing community to rise to the occasion.
In 2014, with funders enforcing OA mandates and Finch Report recommendations, scholarly publishers faced increasing pressure to transform their business models. However, transitioning to OA publishing was largely undefined for many publishers, and involved relatively manual and often time-consuming processes. Using its deep ties with publishers, institutions, authors, and funders, CCC identified opportunities to create efficiencies in the process.
CCC collaborated closely with its first participating publisher, the American Chemical Society (ACS), to launch RightsLink as a platform to help publishers collect and manage Article Processing Charges (APCs). Now, it’s evolved to support a variety of OA business models.
“Having CCC work closely with us, ACS Publications has been able to significantly advance our open access agreements, while providing a consistent process for authors who are in agreements or purchasing on their own. We also use CCC for other [publication charges] besides open access, so it’s familiar to authors.”
— Trina Gerhard, Senior Director of Revenue Operations, and Rhonda Lands, Assistant Director, E-Commerce Product & Process Development, ACS Publications
Created an interoperable OA publishing ecosystem.
CCC responded to the needs of customers for systems interoperability by developing RightsLink integrations with key providers including eJournalPress, Clarivate’s ScholarOne, Aries Systems’ Editorial and ProduXion Manager, Kriyadocs, Scholastica, Oable, OA Switchboard, Sheridan, and more.
“CCC has helped BMJ to integrate RightsLink with other systems in our publishing ecosystem, helping us to streamline our workflow.”
—Gill Flynn, Head of Business Systems Platforms, BMJ Group
Automated OA agreement management.
Publishers quickly saw the benefits of RightsLink as an APC transaction tool and began to adopt the solution. Meanwhile, CCC continued to listen and learn from the scholarly publishing community about its OA challenges. In 2018, CCC introduced first-of-its-kind agreement management tools and funding eligibility workflows to support new and emerging OA agreement types.
“CCC has been an integral part of our operations, particularly in relation to when we ventured into R&P agreements where RightsLink has contributed to our overall success with our OA agreement workflows.”
—Fatima Rashid, System Support Analyst, BMJ Group
Built a collaborative community focused on solving OA challenges.
CCC has deep roots in the scholarly publishing industry and has hosted and participated in numerous community discussions as the OA landscape has evolved. For example, the company hosts interactive customer roundtables with strategic publishing leaders, focused on the changing open scholarly ecosystem and how RightsLink can best support the needs of publishers and their stakeholders. In 2020, CCC formed an OA Researcher Advisory Panel, ensuring that authors’ voices are heard as the RightsLink solution evolves.
This close collaboration with the community has enabled CCC to be a true publishing partner. According to David Famiano, Journals Director at University of California Press, the credibility and reliability CCC has built is essential.
“CCC has long been a reliable and trusted rights and permissions partner for University of California Press. For the past many years, their RightsLink for Scholarly Communications has been an integral component of our open access program and has allowed us to improve our workflows and expand our open access publishing efforts,” he said.
Empowered publishers to scale their OA programs.
RightsLink has unlocked data-driven decision-making power for publishers, enabling them to truly understand and scale their OA programs.
According to David Haber, Publishing Operations Director at the American Society for Microbiology, having the right data makes all the difference.
“We can sing the praises of better collection and improved reporting since partnering with CCC and migrating to RightsLink. But that is a given since their software and collection team are cutting edge,” he said. “What we at ASM truly appreciate is that we have finally been able to take a breath, to look at our OA APC data closely, and point ourselves down a new Subscribe to Open path in a true partnership with a forward-thinking organization.”
CCC recently added a new product to its suite, OA Intelligence, to help publishers disambiguate, model, and analyze publication data to optimize and scale their OA programs. The product gives publishers a 360-degree view of historical publication data to quickly identify new deal opportunities and create tailored, data-driven institutional agreements.
Helped authors access
It’s important to publishers that their authors have a seamless and positive experience throughout the OA publishing workflow. In 2021, CCC enhanced the RightsLink API, allowing submission partners to surface funding entitlements to authors at the time they submit their manuscript, leading to less author confusion and late-stage billing reconciliation.
Served as a thought leader on the developing OA movement.
CCC leaders frequently speak at industry events, hosting sessions such as “OA and the Entrepreneurial Publisher” and “Partnering for Innovative Business Models for Open Access Publishing” at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In 2018, CCC hosted a pop-up webinar and released tools for the community to understand the impact of Plan S, one of the most significant industry events since the Finch Report. In 2019, CCC and Outsell hosted a forum on the future of scientific research and published a report. And in 2023, CCC launched the State of Scholarly Metadata, a thorough examination of metadata management challenges across the research lifecycle, and in 2024 updated this report to highlight some exciting initiatives showing that progress is underway.
Simplified the OA publication workflow.
RightsLink has become a full OA workflow solution for publishers of every size, simplifying the process for everyone involved.
Streamlining the publication process enabled SLACK Incorporated’s OA program to grow, according to Jennifer Kilpatrick, Vice President, Editorial.
“We began working with RightsLink in 2021 as our open access program was starting to grow. As a small publisher, we needed an affordable solution that would facilitate the process for authors and the editorial staff,” she said.
“Since implementation, the process has been simplified for authors, the editorial staff has more time to devote to other tasks, and our open access revenue has increased significantly. The staff at CCC have been responsive and supportive.”
In 2020, CCC released RightsLink’s Touch-Free Workflow, an option that automates payment from consortia, individual institutions and funders without author involvement. This feature significantly enhanced the author experience, enabling researchers to keep their focus on research and not administration.
Enabled transparency and reporting for all stakeholders.
In 2018, CCC released the RightsLink Institutional Portal, enabling institutions to efficiently manage, track, and report on APCs and agreements with their publishers at no cost. RightsLink also provides transactional OA reporting to consortia, funders, and individual institutions. The shared tools and workflows make the OA funding process smoother and more transparent across all stakeholders.
Helped publishers to expand their services and authors to promote their published work.
CCC also offers publishers the ability to leverage RightsLink’s superior workflow technology to offer author services including reprints, custom covers, and research promotion services. This allows publishers to enhance the author experience and expand their offerings by incorporating publication and promotional services directly into the author workflow.
Conclusion
Over the last decade, CCC has proven itself as an OA solutions innovator. As the first solution for automating agreement management, touch-free author workflows, affiliation disambiguation, and deal modeling tools, RightsLink continuously remains on the cutting edge as CCC listens and responds to the needs of the industry. Customers trust CCC as OA workflow experts who help publishers simplify complex OA journeys for their authors.
Here’s to the next 10 years of innovation!