Financing for fee-driven gold open access

pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks 2015-02-08

Summary:

"The most well-known, although neither the most common nor the only, way of providing gold open access to research material is through article or book processing charges (APCs/BPCs). These are problematic in some disciplines where most research work is unfunded (hint: the social sciences and the humanities). It also tends to concentrate costs/risk. To clarify: it is not, in these instances, about paying to bypass quality control. It is paying for the labour of publishing as a service to the author so that research material can be made openly available to read and re-use. Stuart Lawson contends that the UK’s Finch Report, acting on incorrect and outdated information, has now created a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby a narrow range of £1,600-£2,000 has become the norm for APCs. For books, there is a greater range but a much higher cost. The current rates requested by established presses under such a system are high and pose real, possibly insurmountable, challenges for unfunded research: $2450/chapter from de Gruyter; €640/chapter from InTech; £5,900 from Manchester University Press for books of up to 80,000 words; £11,000 from Palgrave; and approximately €15,000 from Springer, to name but a few. Given how keen some publishers (and the UK government, who loves OA for its market perspectives) are on market phenomena, I have a question: why has nobody considered financing schemes to spread APC/BPC costs over a longer period of time? After all, in other market environments, if I want to buy something expensive, I have repayment schemes over a longer term thrust at me ..."

Link:

https://www.martineve.com/2015/02/06/financing-for-fee-driven-gold-open-access/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.economics_of oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.uk oa.prices oa.fees oa.gold oa.books oa.comment oa.new ru.sparc15 oa.journals

Date tagged:

02/08/2015, 11:49

Date published:

02/08/2015, 02:13