Moving Books into Open Access - SPARC

"When Alison Mudditt took the reigns as director of the UC Press five years ago, she was dismayed by its lack of engagement with Open Access, given its shared missions of dissemination and impact of scholarship. Looking at the landscape, Muddit saw a wide range of OA mandates, a growth of hybrid journal models, more flexible licensing terms from publishers, and a moderation in price increases from publishers. Still, open access wasn’t dominated by the traditional publishers and the majority of scholars had not yet shown much interest in it. Last year, the UC Press started a subsidized open-access journal, 'Collabra,' developed with focus group and survey input from faculty. Under this model, authors pay an article processing charge of $875. Reviewers are paid for the reviewing activity, not based on acceptance or rejection. Reviewers can either accept a check, pay forward by donating to Collabra waiver fund for faculty who cannot pay for the cost of publication or donate to institution’s open-access fund. To date, reviewers of all 15 articles that have been published have donated their payment, said Mudditt.  Also in 2015, the press introduced a monograph program, 'Luminos,' designed to take advantage of rich, digital formats ..."