IOP Publishing and UK university libraries collaborate on open access offsetting pilot

"IOP Publishing (IOP), one of the world’s leading scientific publishers, has today announced the launch of a three-year pilot project under which participating universities will be able to offset the majority of their expenditure on hybrid article publication charges (APCs) in IOP journals against their subscription and licence fees. The agreement follows discussions between IOP, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and the Russell Group of leading universities. IOP has developed a sliding scale for its offsetting model, under which its income from APCs for open access publication in subscription-based journals is offset against the licensing costs of universities paying the APCs and is also used to reduce subscription prices for all customers.  At low levels of open access publication in subscription journals, most of the cost is offset to the universities in the pilot; as the number of open access articles increases, the balance moves towards greater global reductions in subscription prices. The sliding scale recognises that as open access publishing grows, all libraries will expect to benefit from a reduction in their subscription prices, but at low levels the primary beneficiaries of the offsetting are the early adopters that are supporting open access ahead of many of their peers.  Twenty UK universities, from University College London to Queen’s University Belfast, have committed to take part in the pilot project, starting in 2014. Their APC payments for articles published by their researchers in the 2014 volumes of IOP’s journals will be offset against their 2015 subscription and licence fees, and so on thereafter ..."