Institute of Physics publishing arm in Austrian open access deal | News | Times Higher Education

"A major publisher has reached a pioneering agreement with Austrian universities and research funders to lower subscription prices as the take up of gold open access increases. The agreement between the Institute of Physics’s publishing arm; the Austrian Science Fund; library consortium the Austrian Academic Consortium and the Austrian Central Library for Physics at the University of Vienna will see the Austrian Science Fund cover the article fees for every author it funds to publish open access with the Institute. In exchange, the publisher has agreed to lower the cost of accessing its journals for participating members of the Austrian Academic Consortium in proportion to the extra funding it receives from article fees.  Last week the UK’s universities and science minister David Willetts called on publishers to give a boost to the take-up of journal-provided gold open access by reaching such price offsetting agreements with individual universities, ensuring that their total expenditure on journals did not increase. Stephen Hall, managing director of IOP Publishing, told the Lords Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry into open access last year that it was inevitable that the UK would pay more in publishing costs if it made the first global move towards full gold open access. This was because even if publishers lowered their subscription charges as their revenue from article fees increases, those reductions would be distributed around the world rather than being focused on the UK ..."