b-on secured until 2021

The 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 in content at four publishers (Annual Reviews, IEEE, Institute of Physics and Wiley). In addition, for the first time, Open Access clauses have been introduced into some contracts: there are now eight publishers fully aligned with FCT's Open Access rules, and it has been possible to negotiate discounts or exemptions from article processing charges (APC) with several publishers - the details will be announced shortly on the b-on website.

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

When negotiating with content providers, FCT relied on a technical advisory group for the negotiations that included members of CRUP, CCISP and APESP, whom it thanks. It was thus possible to achieve the objectives of reconciling the right to read with the right to publish in open access, cost containment, maintenance and expansion of all the content that had been made available until then.