We love the prospect of open access, in libraries. Hosting freely available material is always a benefit to us. Our job is to distribute information and to connect it with people. Good information that comes freely to us, and can be passed on freely to our patrons, is wonderful. But good information, arranged nicely and usefully and vetted as being good, costs money to get from the inside of someone’s brain to the stage we can distribute it – that costs money.
Check out this article excerpt on the new policies from the federal government on open access, and you can read the whole thing here:
The feds’ new open-access policy: Who’s gonna pay for it?
Currently, researchers often have to choose between publishing and science.
In August, the US government announced that it was adopting a policy requiring that all the research it funded is open access. A key element of this plan is that, once the policy takes effect, every research paper that results from this research must be open access the day of its publication. That means anyone can view the research—no journal subscription or one-time payment required.
That, obviously, could pose problems for the academic publishing business, which depends heavily on subscriptions as things are currently structured. To adapt to the inevitable future, many publishers have been adopting “article processing charges” (APCs), or fees paid by the people publishing the paper for the privilege of doing so. All of this is raising an awkward question: Who’s going to pay the APCs?
On Tuesday, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released a survey of researchers that suggests some are already struggling to find the cash to cover APCs, and in some cases, are taking it out of budgets that would otherwise pay for scientific work.
Paying the price
Research journals have a long history of charging fees for publication, going back to the time of what was called “page charges” in the days of print (fees for printing color images were also common). Combined with income from subscriptions and sometimes advertising, these offset the costs of the printing and the editors who arranged for peer review and typically left publishers with a healthy profit. For many journals, these charges have gone away with the growth of online journal access, but there was a history of fees for publication that influenced the development of APCs.
As open-access journals were formed, they faced an obvious challenge: Why would anyone pay for a subscription if the articles could be freely downloaded? As far as I’m aware, all of them turned to APCs as a solution. These needed to perform the same function as subscriptions—covering costs and leaving a profit—and so needed to be substantially higher than the fees previously charged to authors. Many journals that remain subscription-based have also adopted an option where researchers could have their papers made available via open access in return for an APC.
The challenge is how these APCs get paid. A number of foundations that support biomedical research have policies that enable them to pay the APCs on behalf of the researchers they fund. But many more researchers receive funding from government organizations like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. To find out how they were managing, the AAAS did a survey of US-based researchers, receiving over 400 responses.
Those responses revealed a variety of problems.”
“In any case, the authors of the AAAS report paint the problem very clearly: “We face a growing risk that the ability to pay APCs—rather than the merits of the research—will determine what and who gets published.””