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Re: Changing the game

Along with Stevan Harnad, I wonder how such initiatives really will change the economics of the system overall, especially in the short term. Universities will still be paying for subscriptions for many journals and now adding fees in addition, both for new OA journals and for journals that offer OA selectively on payment of the fee. For the latter, the bottom line is more money out the door, unless the publishers really do reduce subscriptions rates somehow in proportion to the number of articles for which OA fees are paid (and since the finances of commercial publishers are not open to the public, how will one ever really know?).

And, for OA journals like PLoS, do we know what profit margin is being built into its business model (or, as we call it in the non-profit world, "surplus")? Does Hindawi tell us what its profit margin is? If the immediate future for scholarly communication just ends up costing more overall (and we should also take into account all those hidden subsidies provided for university-based OA journals that do not charge fees), what then? Has the game really changed or just readjusted the pieces on the chessboard?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 24, 2009

CHANGING THE GAME:
PIONEERS REPORT ON EFFORTS TO SUPPORT OPEN-ACCESS  PUBLICATION

Washington, DC -- Last year, the University of California at
Berkeley and the University of Calgary were among a handful of
institutions that established pools of money, through their
libraries, to cover the cost of open-access journal fees. This
approach -- aimed at supporting a new academic publishing model
that could ultimately relieve at least some of the burden of
expensive journal subscriptions -- has found a receptive audience
among researchers on these two campuses.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
is highlighting two approaches to establishing and maintaining
open-access funds in a new SPARC Member Profile. SPARC is also
preparing to launch a new initiative to provide additional
information and resources detailing options for other
institutions that may be considering such funds.

"Reporting on the progress and challenges associated with
innovative new approaches to sharing research results is a
fundamental component of building change in scholarly
communication," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC.
"These two SPARC members have learned valuable lessons in
establishing their funds and fighting for faculty attention, and
we are grateful to them for sharing the details. We hope the
wider community will join us online to build on these successes,
share some more experiences, and contribute to what promises to
be a deep and engaging discussion."

At UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII)
provides faculty, post-doc and graduate students up to $3,000 to
cover the cost of publishing an article in an open-access
publication -- and up to $1,500 for opening an article that
requires copyright transfer to the publisher. During the 18-month
pilot project, the fund covered 52 articles at an average cost of
$1,500 for open-access publications and $1,280 for articles
requiring copyright transfer. During Calgary's first 13 months,
the library's Open Access Authors Fund received 67 official
submissions to cover open-access fees at an average cost of
$1,538 (in Canadian dollars).

The cost of journal subscriptions at times is crippling for
libraries and the Canadian university wanted to experiment with a
different way of encouraging Open Access. "With money for Open
Access coming from the library, we are trying to change the
model," says Andrew Waller, serials librarian in Collection
Services, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of
Calgary.

When David Ackerly, associate professor of integrative biology at
UC Berkeley wanted to publish a paper about the potential impact
of climate change on plants of California, he turned to the
library to cover the fee to publish in PLoS One, an initiative of
the Public Library of Science. "I absolutely wanted the results
to be freely available to the press, state agencies and others
who don't necessarily have access to the libraries and journals,"
he says. "It really paid off.  When it was published, we got
great press coverage."

The Berkeley initiative set out to encourage a more sustainable
scholarly communication environment. "We shouldn't be beholden to
a single fund-flow model supporting journal publishing," says
Chuck Eckman, associate university librarian and director of
collections at the UC Berkeley Library.  In addition, Eckman
suggests, "It is really important for academic libraries to forge
relationships with research offices and think about their
respective and complementary roles in the broader community of
authors and readers."

To read more about the UC Berkeley or University of Calgary
open-access efforts visit the SPARC Web site at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications. The new SPARC resource for
open-access funds will be announced this fall.

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