Taylor & Francis have this week announced that they are going to offer substantially reduced article processing charges (APCs) for developing and transition countries, and in some cases waive charges entirely. The 12 month deal covers 45 countries that are part of the EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) network. EIFL is a not for profit organisation that aims to provide access to scholarly material for developing and transition countries. They help libraries gain access to knowledge by providing training resources, as well a brokering deals with publishers to provide access to databases at substantially reduced prices (a full list of EIFL licensed e-resources can be found here http://www.eifl.net/e-resources). This new deal with Taylor & Francis is the first time that EIFL have brokered a deal to help authors pay APCs. EIFL Director Rima Kuprytehad this to say of the deal:
“EIFL is excited about the article publishing charge agreement with Taylor & Francis. It is the first time we have signed an agreement like this, so it will be interesting to see how authors from our network will react. We’ve already received some positive feedback.” Rima Kypryte, Published in a Taylor and Francis press release.
The deal covers 66 Taylor & Francis Open, Routledge Open, and CogentOA fully open access journals, a full list of participating journals can be found here. The 66 journals all either charge APCs at $250 or the fees are completely waived. A list of the 45 EIFL countries that are part of the deal and their corresponding APC rate can be found in this document.
The open access journal Collabra is now open for submissions. Collabra is a fully open access mega-journal covering three main fields of study: Ecology & Environmental Sciences, Life and Biomedical Sciences, and Social and Behavioural Sciences. We have blogged about Collabra previously, so if you are interested in finding out more check out our previous post here.
Here's a quick summary of Collabra:
It has a relatively low APC (Article Processing Charge) of $875 USD
Collabra gives reviewers the option of receiving payment for their reviews
Collabra can waive the APC charge for those unable to pay
It offers optional open peer-review
Use of article-level metrics to track downloads, pageviews, and social-media sharing
Post-publication commenting on articles.
Collabra has partnered with the platform provider Ubiquity Press - an open access publisher who provide a variety of journal hosting services (as well as book publishing). By entering into such a partnership, journals can share infrastructure which can enable greater efficiency and sustainability.
We are also delighted to report that University of St Andrews academic Akira O'Connor from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience has joined the Social and Behavioural Sciences editorial team at Collabra.
To submit an article to Collabra or to find out more visit the website.
University of California Press will soon launch a new fully open access mega-journal* called Collabra. The new journal is set to launch in March 2015 alongside a new open access book program called Luminos:
“As part of the world’s greatest public research university we knew that we needed to make a significant investment to meet the changing publishing and dissemination needs of our audiences,” said Alison Mudditt, Director of UC Press. “These programs have been shaped by hundreds of conversations with faculty, librarians, and other key stakeholders. With Luminos, we will combine the global reach and visibility of OA with our unwavering commitment to publishing superior scholarship to create a speedboat, not a life raft, that will carry monographs forward and allow them to remain a vital resource.” University of California Press
Collabra is a fully open access journal that requires authors to pay APC charges in order to get papers published. This charge covers the cost of production, as well as operating costs, staff wages, etc. In most fully open access journals there is significant profit to be made through APCs and these margins are increased as reviewers are traditionally unpaid. It is sometimes said that unpaid reviewing is simply part and parcel of academic culture, however the innovative payment scheme of Collabra proves that this doesn’t have to be the case. At Collabra, the APC costs $875, $250 of which goes towards paying the reviewers. The reviewers can then decide what they would like to do with the money. They can choose to keep the money, put the money into an APC waiver fund for researchers unable to pay the fee, or pay it forward to their institution’s open access APC fund.
“The journal model is not just about paying reviewers but also about directing some of the value generated back into the research community.” Collabra
We approached Dan Morgan, the Digital Science Publisher at Collabra for a quick explanation of the Collabra process:
"By assigning a percentage of the APC for the research community, Collabra spreads revenue and tangibly shows the value of this work, creating a true partnership. Collabra is enabling the research community to decide what to do with this value that it generates. Reviewers and editors can elect to pay themselves, or pay it forward to the Collabra waiver fund, or their institution's OA fund - in the latter instances creating more OA opportunities for more people. We'd love it if they did that, but importantly it is their choice, and not ours." Dan Morgan
Traditional publishing practice sees value directed solely back to the publisher (Dan Morgan)
So, the journal will put more emphasis on the value added by academics, who mostly work for free for publishers when reviewing and editing. By offering an APC waiver the journal can also serve as an open access publishing platform to those “priced-out” by the often high APC charges demanded by publishers.
Collabra will focus on three main disciplines at launch: life and biomedical sciences, ecology and environmental science, and social and behavioural sciences. To find out more about Collabra why not visit the website (http://www.collabraoa.org/), or share your thoughts and opinions using their twitter handle @CollabraOA (https://twitter.com/collabraoa). *A mega-journal is a journal that has a number of key characteristics. It will be fully Open Access (with no subscription options), it will not judge articles based on perceived importance, instead judgement will be based on “scientific, methodological and ethical soundness and credibility” http://www.collabraoa.org/faq.php#article-processing-charges. Mega journals also often have a fairly broad coverage. A good example of a scholarly mega-journal is PLoS one http://www.plosone.org/
**We extend a special thanks to Dan Morgan and Lorraine Weston of Collabra for providing information and permission to reuse image and video content
The University Library is delighted to announce St Andrews participation in the Institute of Physics 3-year pilot offsetting Open Access costs against Library journal subscriptions. This means that in the long term the Library can use subscription rebates from IOP hybrid journal titles of up to 90% of Open Access costs (known as Article Processing Charges or APCs) to fund more OA. Twenty-two university libraries are taking part and the scheme has the support of Research Libraries UK. It is hoped that the pilot will help institutions and authors manage the transition from subscription to author pays publication and demonstrate to the research community that efficient, sustainable Open Access publication models can be agreed that work for researchers, universities and publishers.
Key facts
The agreement will help the Library to release money to fund future open access publications from the Library budget and will help supplement the block grants being provided by the Research Councils.
You can publish in IOP journals included in the pilot and be compliant with open access policies from major funders.
If you wish to choose the paid route to achieve open access you will need to select ‘open access publication’ when you submit a paper to an IOP subscription journal.
You will need to liaise with the Open Access support team to check on the availability of APC funds from the Library. Contact open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk
All submissions will go through the normal editorial and peer review process and only articles of sufficient quality will be accepted for publication by IOP.
Article charges paid on fully open access journals like New Journal of Physics (NJP) will not be rebated as these journals do not have a subscription charge.
Yesterday, the 11th of November, Akira O'Connor got his paper published in PeerJ; an open access journal with a very innovative publishing system. Akira publishes fascinating research on, amongst other things, the sensations of memory such as déjà vu experiences. His latest paper published in PeerJ concerns the conflictive relationship between two neurological stimuli, novelty and familiarity, which define the déjà vu memory experience. PeerJ recently invited Akira to comment on his research and also his experience publishing with the journal. The interview, which is on the PeerJ blog, makes for a fascinating read as it delves into Akira's research interests, his motivations to publish open access, and his thoughts on Open Peer Review. See the full interview here.
The vast majority of open access journals charge APCs (Article Processing Charges). The rationale being that because content is freely available, journals need to adopt APCs to cover the loss of subscription revenue. These APCs can range from a few hundred pounds to as much as £4000!
PeerJ on the other hand is a fully open access journal that does not use APCs, instead opting for one-off lifetime membership payments. Authors simply choose a subscription based on how much they would like to publish on a yearly basis. All the paid options are one-off payments that result is a lifetime of free publishing with the journal. This obviously represents fantastic value for money when compared to a £4000 APC for a single publication.
Copyright 2014 PeerJ
If you would like to publish in PeerJ, contact the Open Access team as we will cover the cost of Basic membership. More information about this can be found here.
The fund has been established since August 2013. We recognised that good research would not always receive support from major funders to pay article processing charges (APCs) and that this was potentially unfair, especially to early career researchers. We also wanted to ensure that all researchers can publish in the most appropriate venue, as described in our Open Access Policy. If ‘most appropriate’ means a fully open access journal that requires payment of an APC (as opposed to a ‘hybrid’ journal where APCs are an option), then we should provide funds to support this choice. To date we have processed about 13 APCs for researchers who have no other source of funding, all to support science-related article publication in Biology, Computer Science, Medicine and Physics. The science bias is partly due to the greater number of open access model publications in these disciplines. But this is likely to change with the introduction of these models into Humanities and Social Science where progress has been slower. The level of individual APC is significantly lower (avg £1,257) compared to publication in hybrid journals and this has helped continue the fund into 2014-15.
The University has supported Open Access for some time, firstly by mandating Etheses deposit into Research@StAndrews:FullText in 2006. We encourage all our researchers to consider publishing Open Access, whether funded or not, and the Library will continue to support this choice through its fund*. Corresponding authors must be a member of staff to be eligible.
An alliance of charities including Wellcome Trust, British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK has launched a fund to make charitably funded research immediately free to access and re-use. The Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Trust said "This approach helps to ensure that this knowledge can be built upon and used in a manner that maximises health and public benefit."
The Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) will provide single combined block grants to UK research institutions to meet open access article processing charges for peer-reviewed research publications resulting from research funded by one or more of the six partner charities: Arthritis Research UK, Breast Cancer Campaign, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and the Wellcome Trust.
The University of St Andrews already receives a block grant to support open access for Wellcome-funded research papers, and this joint fund will make it even easier to comply with these funders' open access policies.
For details on the existing criteria for Wellcome Trust funded authors, including the policy extension to cover monographs and book chapters from Oct 2014, see our Library web pages.
Recently the Open Access and Repository Service Support Team has compiled information on APC spending. APC stands for Article Processing Charge, and this is the charge that applies for Gold open access publishing. In short, APCs cover the operating costs involved in the publication process that would have traditionally been covered by subscriptions.
The information is hosted on Figshare; a cloud-based online storage and distribution platform. This will ensure the data is widely and openly distributed to members of other institutions as well as our own. The spreadsheet lists publication level data which details how the University of St Andrews has spent centrally managed Open Access (OA) funds. Article Processing Charges (APCs) are reported from our RCUK and Wellcome Trust Block Grants, and from a small Library OA fund.
Universities are being encouraged to share data about the costs of Open Access publishing. We believe that sharing information helps the academic community to understand how publishing is changing in the new Open Access environment. For instance, we noted useful information about prepay schemes (these offer discounts as well as streamlining the payment process), as well as highlighting issues that arose during the Open Access payment process.
It was announced recently in a Royal Society of Chemistry press release that one of their leading journals, Chemical Science, is to go Gold Open Access in 2015. Not only that, but Chemical Science will be waiving open access charges (Article Processing Charges, or APCs) for 2 years.
"From January 2015 onwards, all new content in Chemical Science will be free for anyone to access. And to ease the transition to open access, the Royal Society of Chemistry is waiving all Article Processing Charges (APCs) for two years." (RSC Press release)
With an impact factor of over 8.3 Chemical Science is undoubtedly one of the leading scientific journals attracting a high level of citations. With this in mind it is encouraging to see a leading journal not only following a growing trend but advocating the open access cause as well. This is not new for the publisher, as 2 years ago the RSC introduced early policies to help authors pay for gold open access in lieu of institutional funding (covered in our blog here). The Royal Society of Chemistry President, Professor Dominic Tildesley, said that the announcement was: "a momentous step forward in sharing chemical science knowledge world-wide." He went on to say: "As the world's leading chemistry community and a not-for-profit organisation, our mission is to serve the best interests of chemistry and society, as we have done for over 170 years. There can be no better way to fulfil that mission than by taking our leading journal to Gold open access."
David Willetts, who recently resigned as Minister for Universities and Science, applauded the RSC pointing out the positive image the world has of UK chemistry research and fact that the UK is leading the way in terms of "applying open access principles".
There is sure to be more information forthcoming regarding the change to open access policy at Chemical Science. But at this early stage it is fair to speculate that waiving Article Processing Charges is likely to increase uptake in the journal as more people will wish to take advantage of the high impact factor coupled with the increased visibility gold open access offers.
