Plos strikes California deal as big publishers drop paywalls | Times Higher Education (THE)

"The Public Library of Science has struck a deal with the University of California system designed to sustain the open-access publisher’s subscription-free journals and cover the cost of article processing charges.

The two-year agreement, which will use a combination of California library payments and researcher grant support to cover article processing charges for California research published by Plos journals, is designed to protect Plos periodicals at a time when they face a potential threat from the transition of traditional subscription-based publishers to “read-and-publish” deals in which universities pay publication fees up front in return for the removal of paywalls....

Sara Rouhi, director of strategic partnerships at Plos, said that author-paid fees were only meant to be an interim solution to help academic publishing move away from subscription barriers.

“What UC is doing, by choosing to put Plos as one of their first deals, is really meant to be a signal to the broader library community that these are the publishers that pioneered this model and have been on the right side of history from day one, and we can’t leave them on the sidelines,” she said....

Yet the change also raised the obvious possibility of pressure building over time for funding agencies to stop including money for author fees in grants, Dr MacKie-Mason acknowledged.

For that problem, he said, the solution must eventually require consultations among a broad cross-section of journals, funding agencies and universities to gain agreement on a common long-term set of cost-sharing norms...."