Do OA funds support hybrid? | Australian Open Access Support Group

eekilcer@gmail.com's bookmark collection 2014-03-06

Summary:

"Do OA funds support hybrid?

Cost comparisons about hybrid publication can be confusing to an individual author trying to decide if paying for hybrid open access is worthwhile. But if their funding body is paying for publication charges, they might not have a choice. This page looks at the position many OA funds take on hybrid publication.

There are indicators that more money is becoming available in the sector for open access publication. According to Wiley’s 2013 author survey on open access, authors had reported a larger percentage of funding for publication compared with the previous year: “Over half of responding authors received grant funding (24% full funding, 29% partial funding) to cover Article Publication Charges (APCs), an increase of 43% from 2012″.

This is not surprising given the continuously growing list of funding bodies, governments and institutions committing to open access. But are these growing funds available for hybrid publishing? It seems in many cases they are not….

The list of open access journal funds from the Open Access Directory contains details of 81 funds worldwide. The QUT fund is the only Australian fund listed.

A brief analysis of this list (as at February 2014) shows that 39.5% of the funds (32) state they do not support hybrid journals.

Only 13.5% of the funds (11) state they support hybrid journals outright. A further 13.5% support hybrid journals with conditions attached – either by providing less funding for hybrid journals than fully open access journals (seven funds), or by specifying that hybrid journals without embargoes are supported.

In two cases, the University of Calgary, and the University of Utah, the funds state they support hybrid journals only where there is a commitment by the publisher to proportionally reduce their subscription fees. But as noted above, it is almost impossible to determine if a journal is reducing its subscription, so this clause would be difficult to enact. As at February 2014, neither of the people approached at Utah or Calgary universities had responded to the query about how they were monitoring this clause.

Of the 27 funds that do not mention hybrid, nine specifically state the funds “support OA journals” and in all probability this means non-hybrid journals, as is clarified in the University of Manitoba’s eligibility criteria. Without a full analysis of all of these funds, it is not clear how many do not include hybrid – but this potentially increases the number of funds that specifically do not support hybrid to half.

What does all this mean? At the very least, before considering hybrid publication authors need to check the rules of their funding body, or they might find themselves out of pocket."

Link:

http://aoasg.org.au/funding-hybrid/

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Date tagged:

03/06/2014, 08:46

Date published:

03/06/2014, 03:46