Scholastica Blog — A Pay-it-Forward Approach to Open Access Publishing: Interview with Neil Christensen of UC Press

"Neil Christensen is the director of digital development at the University of California Press (UCP). Prior to working at UCP, Christensen worked in business development and as a medical editorial director at Wiley, as well as an executive editor at Nature Publishing Group. Neil Christensen is helping pioneer a new model for open access (OA) publishing, by giving value back to the academic community in dollars. In his role as director of digital development at the University of California Press (UCP), Christensen, together with digital science publisher Dan Morgan and a team of colleagues at the press and University of California, are launching a new kind of OA journal. Like other OA journals, UCP’s will generate publication funding from article processing charges (APCs). Only instead of keeping profit earned from those APCs, UCP’s journal will “pay it forward” by giving editors and reviewers the opportunity to put their earnings towards their supporting institution’s OA initiatives or the article processing charges of future authors’ submissions to the journal. I interviewed Neil Christensen to learn more about UCP’s new OA journal and his hopes for the unique publishing model it will use. Below is a transcript of our conversation. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section! ..."