SV: A Useful Clarification of Harvard's OA Fund

[Jan Frantsvag <jan.e.frantsvag@uit.no>]

Hi Ann, David

I've been following this discussion for some days, and would just 
like to say something about our thinking.

At the University of Tromso we are setting up a fund to pay APCs 
for authors not having grants (it will go public in just some 
days). We at the University Library are going to administer this 
fund, and one of our principles is that we pay the whole cost, or 
nothing. If the corresponding author belongs to our university, 
we pay, otherwise we leave the cost for others. This is, we 
believe, the same policy as the University of Lund have. They are 
spending some USD 300,000 a year in their fund, so they should be 
listened to. We will be willing to hear arguments in special 
cases that we should pay APCs even if we don't have the 
corresponding author, if so, we will pay the whole APC.

Splitting bills is time-, and hence cost-, consuming. Let us use 
the money for APCs, not for internal administration. (I've had - 
in an earlier life -the responsibility of introducing electronic 
handling of incoming invoices at the Universities, and have seen 
how large the costs are for processing invoices, both incoming 
and outgoing.)

When enough institutions have set ut funds, APCs will be funded 
without major problems. - There is some way to go, of course!

Best,
Jan Erik Frantsvag
Open Access Adviser
The University Library of Tromso
  _______________________________

From:  David Prosser
Sent:  2011-02-10 03:30
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: A Useful Clarification of Harvard's OA Fund

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