Re: A Useful Clarification of Harvard's OA Fund

[David Prosser <david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk>]

Hi Ann

That's a good question and I don't think I can answer.  I have to 
say that I am neither an expert in nor spokesperson for HOPE, 
just passing on what is in the public domain.

HOPE gives details of how they split multi-author papers, and if 
all the authors are in the same institution this would be 
relatively simple.  See:

http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/hope

But it is easy to imagine a paper in the arts and humanities that 
does not result from a grant and is co-authored by two or three 
authors from two or three institutions.  What is harder to 
imagine is any publisher wanting to deal separately with all of 
the authors, so ideally there should be some mechanism in place 
to bring together the payments.  I don't know if there is 
currently such a mechanism within HOPE.

(Unless in the long-term institutions come to the conclusion that 
for the amounts of money were talking about it is easier just for 
the corresponding author's institution to pay the full amount and 
that, within the rounding errors of university budgets, it will 
all average itself out!  Do we have an idea of the scale of the 
issue - the number of multi-institutional papers that don't 
result from grant-funding?)

David



On 9 Feb 2011, at 01:29, Ann Okerson wrote:

> Dear David -- having just gotten to the Schieber blog, I found
> the following:
>
> "But even if none of them had been grant-funded, HOPE covers fees
> prorated based on Harvard authorship.  Since only 65 of the 144
> authors on these articles were Harvard affiliated, it would have
> covered only 65/144 (about 45%) of the fees. The cost would be
> (65/144) x $3000 x 24 = $32,500..."
>
> So, in the event that a multi-authored article was *not* grant
> funded (which seems as if it would rarely happen), how would the
> fee collection work for the remaining percentage of the fees that
> were owed by other institutions?  It might be quicker and cheaper
> just to pay it all out of one fun, for example that of the first
> listed author?
>
> Regards, Ann Okerson