Matching Publication Costs with Publication Funds

"To get a research article published, the person or entity organising the publication encounters costs -  the ‘publication costs’. Examples are staff handling the manuscript and supporting the peer review process, and system licenses or in-house system development and maintenance. There are various ways to cover these costs, such as:

• A charge to the beneficiary of the publication service (i.e. the author) or a party on their behalf (e.g. their research funder or institution/library);

• Funding of the overall publishing initiative (e.g. a host organisation subsidising staff time, computers, hosting, etc);

• Financial support to contribute to the initiative (e.g. research funder grants, donations from authors’ affiliated institutions).

We refer to the way in which the publication costs are covered as the business or economic model (think of APCs, institutional membership, subscribe-to-open, P&R/R&P deals, publication agreements, non-APC based models, etc). Parties contributing to these costs hold the so-called ‘publication funds’. If a specific party is paying the costs for a specific publication, we can call them the ‘publication funder’.

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The challenge in matching publication costs with publication funds for funders, institutions and publishers is that they are faced with a myriad of systems and processes. This causes complexity and administrative burden, hampering the implementation of policies and agreements and the development of new business models to support a broader move to OA. From a researcher’s perspective, this landscape is at best confusing, and at worst impenetrable....

The OA Switchboard – a central information exchange hub – is an independent intermediary, connecting parties and systems, streamlining communication and the neutral exchange of OA-related publication level information. Through its standard messaging protocol, automated validation and routing, it takes care of ensuring authoritative data from source. The shared infrastructure connects and complements existing systems and solutions, leveraged with PIDs.

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Through predefined ‘messages’ - effectively a set of publication-level metadata sent from stakeholder 1 to stakeholder 2 to enable a question/answer or a notification – OA Switchboard supports a wide variety of use cases.

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The Eligibility Enquiry (or ‘E1-E2 message’) supports the communication between the publisher and a specific publication funder and is exchanged during the publication workflow (usually between submission of a manuscript and acceptance for publication). This message type is relevant for APC-based models, as well as the ‘prior agreement’ scenario (transformative agreements, pure publish deals etc) when there is a direct relation between the publication cost of a certain publication and the coverage of such costs.

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The Publication/Payment Settlement Notification (or ‘P1-message’) is sent by the publisher at the point of acceptance or publication, to confirm the version of record and financial settlement details (if applicable) to the publication funder of the publication concerned. The P-message also supports the matching of publication costs and publication funds in case of non-APC based models (e.g. diamond) and other models (e.g. subscribe-to-open). What the P-message enables here, is ‘Reporting Made Easy’, which can facilitate follow-up conversations on financial arrangements...."