Going for True Gold: Why the Norwegian Research Council is Taking a Stand Against Hybrid OA Journals - A guest post by Jan Erik Frantsvåg - Digital Science

"The Norwegian Research Council (NRC) released a new funding scheme for article publication charges (APCs) for author pays, open access (OA) articles, in June this year. In short, the NRC will refund up to 50 % of APC costs incurred by Higher Education (HE) institutions to the institutional publication fund – provided that such a fund exists. No fund, no refund, is the message from the NRC. Or, rather: Get yourself a fund! It is clear that the NRC sees the creation of institutional publication funds as an important step towards an OA future and as a policy to foster the establishing of those funds, this is likely to be highly effective. In the HE sector, funds are widespread, 15 funds have been established so far and all major institutions have one. For sectors outside of higher education (For instance, health), publications funds are not as common and so the NRC plans to work out mechanisms for partial APC refunds without insisting on a fund. The thinking behind a 50 per cent figure – which will be given no matter who originally financed the research – is that the NRC pays for about half of all research in Norway, so therefore, they should shoulder half the cost. The mechanism also addresses concerns about “post-project” publications, the cost of which cannot be charged to grants once their respective projects are concluded. The NRC’s policy is that all publications arising from research that it funds should be OA, but they have previously shown no preference for Gold or Green. The new scheme could be seen as a change in attitude and a strong preference towards the Gold OA path. There are limits to what the NRC will fund, though. They have two clear rules: Journals must have a minimal level of quality assurance, for instance through adequate peer review. This requirement is feasible because the Norwegian financing system already has an accreditation framework for journals. This takes care of the quality aspect. The journals must be listed in the DOAJ. This means that delayed OA, and more strikingly hybrid journals will not qualify for funding. While some international funding agencies have expressed concern about the cost of hybrid journals, few are as direct about discouraging their use by authors ..."