Five Universities Sign Open Access Funding Compact
Schools asked to institutionalize support, underwrite journal processing fees
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 9/15/2009
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- Need to ramp up institutional support
- More institutional funds will level the playing field
- Harvard's Shieber argues for even more
It's hard to bootstrap a new industry model into existence, even in the best of times. And no matter how compelling its conceptual underpinnings may be, open access publishing is subject to the same economic realities as any other kind of publishing.
So, to institutionalize support for an alternative to the main scholarly communication model, five schools at the forefront of the open access debate—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, MIT, and UC Berkeley—have announced their joint support for "A Compact on Open-Access Publishing."
The release accompanying the Compact touts the economic advantages of a robust author-pays option for scholarly publishing, and urges the academic community to step up university-wide efforts to make the author-pays model more viable.
Berkeley has an existing program to reimburse authors for open access publishing fees, while the other schools are developing such funds.
The Compact in its entirety states:
We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.
Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.
The economic arguement
In a Public Library of Science Biology article fleshing out the case for institutional funding options, Harvard open access policy architect Stuart M. Shieber argues that, while an entrenched infrastructure has developed surrounding the subscription journal model, nothing comparable currently exists to support the author-pays model.
Shieber also contended that "processing fees are the only revenue source that inherently scales directly with the publishing services provided by a journal."
Ramping up
A number of schools already have or are developing funds to cover author fees, but the Compact is being presented as a means of engaging more schools in a community-wide effort to directly support open access with designated funds rather than rhetoric.
In the article, Shieber argues for policies even stricter than what is explicitly asked of institutions signing the Compact. For example, Shieber proposes that institutions should consider funding only "pure" open access journals, not those classified as hybrid or delayed open access journals (a notable departure even from the policies of the few schools that offer open access funds).
"It seems inappropriate to support a transitional business model," Shieber wrote, arguing that hybrid and delayed OA journals do not benefit institutions as directly as a journal model that entails no post-publication charges.
Contact the author: josh.hadro@reedbusiness.com
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