UI pushes for open access to academic journals | Iowa City Press Citizen | press-citizen.com

"It’s been 12 years, but Bruce Ayati remembers well the time he submitted his article to a traditional scholarly journal. When he asked its editors for a PDF copy, they refused. Ayati, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Iowa, uses the story to demonstrate his support for open access publishing, journals that don’t require subscriptions and instead are sustained by publication fees. At the time, Ayati had taken a break from academia, so he didn’t have access to an academic library. 'If I can’t get a copy of my own paper, then who can?' he said. UI officials also are throwing their support behind open access publishing, and they’re trying to encourage more of their researchers to do the same. This week, the Office of the Provost and UI Libraries established a $50,000 fund to cover researchers’ publication fees for open access journals, which can be as much as $3,000. Library officials say it will be an annual fund. Researchers say open access publishing gets their work read by more people than traditional journals, there’s a faster turnaround time to publication and the practice has the potential to shift power away from expensive scholarly journals. When researchers publish in an open access journal, they’re charged a publication fee. Mike Wright, UI’s interim associate university librarian for collections and scholarly communication, estimates that fees range from $100 up to $3,000. For researchers who don’t receive grant funding for their work — funding tends to concentrate in the medical and biological sciences — the fee is enough to deter them from open access, he said. 'If I’m an assistant professor in a humanities discipline, I’m probably not bringing in a huge salary, and a $2,500 publishing fee is a heck of a lot of money,' Wright said. 'If I have a choice between an open access journal and a traditional journal that doesn’t charge me, I’m probably going to go with the traditional journal.' Beginning this week, UI is offering to pay up to $3,000 in publishing fees for open access and up to $1,500 fees for 'hybrid' open access, journals that require a subscription but allow open access to certain articles for a fee. Researchers must not have received grant funding to perform the research ..."