SAGE Publishing Expands Business with Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink for Open Access

December 13, 2017 – SAGE Publishing, a leading international publisher of journals, books, and digital media for academic, educational, and professional markets, has substantially expanded their investment in the RightsLink® for Open Access platform from Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a global licensing and content solutions organization.

RightsLink for Open Access is a metadata-driven e-commerce platform that helps publishers provide a best-in-class experience for their authors throughout the publication process by streamlining author fee transactions for open access charges, page charges, color charges, and more, right within the workflow.

SAGE initially partnered with RightsLink in March 2015 to implement an efficient, flexible, and scalable solution for managing article publication charges (APCs), while addressing institutional requirements and complying with funder mandates.

Reflecting the growth and evolution of its open access publishing program, SAGE has now expanded their RightsLink participation to include 60 additional open access journals and is working towards adding their full portfolio of publications offering hybrid OA options.

SAGE is also the first early adopter of RightsLink’s new OA Agreement Manager (forthcoming in February), which automates authors’ OA funding requests using agreement-based business rules and enables publishers, institutions, and funders to manage and report on transactions. As a close partner, SAGE’s feedback was instrumental to the development of this new functionality, which is designed to remove friction from paying, managing, and reporting on APCs by connecting stakeholders through automated, data-driven tools.

“We are pleased to expand our relationship with CCC by broadening the journals and transactions managed through RightsLink,” said Graeme Doswell, SAGE’s Head of Business Solutions and System Operations. “Outsourcing author transactions to CCC makes sense not only to provide our authors with an easy tool to make payments but also provides us with a scalable, reliable platform to serve the evolving needs of institutions and funders.”

“We believe that publishers can use RightsLink, which provides a seamless and easy experience for authors throughout the article production process, to grow and prosper in today’s author-centric publishing environment,” said Jennifer Goodrich, Director of Product Management, CCC. “We are proud that SAGE Publishing chose CCC to support them in their rapid rise in the OA world and we continue to benefit from the partnership as we continue to explore enhancements and improvements to RightsLink for Open Access together.”