OA monograph costs | Open Research

“The majority of University and scholarly society presses that publish on open access monographs do not charge authors or readers, except for those ordering print copies.The OAPEN-UK HSS Researcher Survey (between Feb-May 2012) examined the source of funding for research underpinning authors’ last HSS monograph and found that only 22% came from research council grants, whereas 62% came from core university funds or self-funding.

The Open Book Publishers membership scheme (OBP) is a new agreement from Jisc Collections that supports the publication of Open Access research monographs. By joining this scheme, member institutions will support the publication of at least twelve new Open Access research monographs every year. For an annual fee of £270 member institutions can also offer all staff, students and alumni with a discount on any print copies of OBP titles. Any print sales to member institutions are offset against membership fees in the following year.

How much do commercial publishers charge for OA monographs?

As with open access journals there is a need for a new business model. The Wellcome Trust extended their open access policy to include monographs in 2013. They estimate: “the fee for existing open access options – ensuring all published material is converted to XML, and then made available in html and PDF – for books currently averages around £9,500, and we anticipate the average cost to make a book chapter open access will be £1,800″.

This book price seems to be halfway between what is charged by traditional publishers offering and OA option, and OA only publishers. Prices seem to vary considerably (note prices from September 2018)…”

ResearchEquals Supporting Memberships

“Supporting memberships are a community based approach to how ResearchEquals evolves. They come with membership dues (€79.99 per year or €9.99 per month) and together we build a network of people with one common denominator: To make all research work visible.

As a supporting member, you get front row in shaping ResearchEquals. Every member has equal voice regardless of whether you are a professor, junior researcher, citizen scientist, or even an institute. One member, one vote.

With a supporting membership you also get certain rights:

The right to request information
The right to petition for action or to desist action
The right to block third party acquisitions…”

CORE Welcomes 10 New Members

Our new members

University of Oxford
University of St Andrews
The University of Huddersfield
University of Lancaster
White Rose Research (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield and University of York)
University of Bristol
Queen’s University Belfast
University of Birmingham
Anglia Ruskin University
University of Chicago

 

Crossref launches Global Equitable Membership programme | Research Information

“To enable organisations from the least financially-advantaged countries to participate in the global community documenting the progress of scholarship, Crossref announces a program of free membership and content registration. 

Crossref, whose vision is a rich and reusable open scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society, announces that, starting in January, organisations located in any of 58 countries on its curated list will be eligible to join as full members, and register their content and related metadata free of charge. The new scheme is known as the Global Equitable Membership (GEM) programme, and it will be available for new organisations and automatically applied to 187 existing members….”

CORE Membership – launching soon! – Research

“CORE (core.ac.uk), a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University in partnership with Jisc, has been serving the scholarly community since 2011 and in that time has experienced phenomenal growth in every way. CORE collates Open Access research from over 10,500 data providers across the world and is now the largest collection of open access research literature. Over 30 million users each month access CORE, either via search or one of our  services. We have also worked hard to develop services for our data providers and support them with tools to help better manage the content in their repositories, including improving discoverability, registering unique persistent identifiers, enriching content with data such as missing DOIs and helping monitor that their content remains compliant with Open Access policies and mandates….

CORE is a not-for-profit endeavour, committed to the the Principles of Open Science Infrastructure (POSI), and we have always strived to ensure that the service remains completely free for public use. This means funding the service is no small task. Today sees the start of a new effort to help not only sustain CORE, but to enable us to continue to grow and support our huge community of users. 

We’re hugely excited to announce the pre-launch of the CORE Membership program, designed exclusively for organisations such as academic institutions and data providers. 

 

The new CORE Membership programme offers your organisation a very public way of supporting a key component of the global Open Science scholarly infrastructure. Your membership confers several key benefits including: …”

PeerJ welcomes Western University to our Three Year Publishing Memberships program

We are delighted to announce that Western University, Canada, has joined our Three-Year Fixed Term Memberships Program. Western is the latest institution to sign up to the program which offers an innovative alternative to Article Processing Charges for Open Access. Under the agreement, the cost of Three-Year Memberships for Western University-affiliated authors are waived, meaning no out-of-pocket fees for faculty members to publish in PeerJ’s seven journals. 

“Open access publishing is a priority for Western Libraries, and we are pleased to now offer the PeerJ membership to our researchers. We are committed to supporting cost-effective open access initiatives where our faculty are contributing or publishing. We want to make open access publishing more accessible to our researchers, and PeerJ is helping us do that,” writes Kristin Hoffmann, Research and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Western Libraries. 

Western University and Western Libraries are clearly committed to the principles of Open Access, as well as innovative, cost-effective routes to open publishing such as our Three-Year Memberships program. We are excited to welcome Western to the PeerJ community and look forward to working with their researchers across our seven journals. They are the fifth institution to provide Three Year Membership as an Open Access option to their faculty, following the University of California, Berkeley, University of Ottawa, Iowa State University and the University of Sussex

Compared to the astronomical APC fees of many other publishers, Memberships provide great value for money, and allow more authors to publish Open Access. We remain committed to promoting Memberships as the low-cost, sustainable alternative to Article Processing Charge, and welcome inquiries about the program from other universities. PeerJ Three Year Fixed Term Memberships, priced at $239 per author, are valid from the date of an author’s first publication and for a further 36 months, during which they can publish a total of three articles at any point, giving authors more flexibility as to when, and how often, they publish. When authors use their full complement of three publications, the per-author cost borne by Western averages out at under $80/article. Under the agreement, all co-authors must hold a PeerJ Membership in order to publish; any Memberships previously held by Western-affiliated authors remain valid. Authors can still choose to pay via APC fees if they prefer. 

The [Opening the Future] model in summary

“Opening the Future is a collective subscription model that, through its membership scheme, makes library funds go further: achieving the dual objectives of increasing collections and supporting Open Access. Members pay a small annual fee to get unlimited multi-user access to two series of the well-regarded Liverpool University Press backlist; the membership revenue is used to produce new OA monographs….”

News – The Open Library of Humanities welcomes Iowa State University as a higher tier supporter

“We are very pleased to announce that we have recently welcomed a new higher-tier supporter to our library board.  Iowa State University Library is a signatory of the Open Access 2020 Initiative and is active in national and international efforts to advance open access. As part of a land-grant university with a mission to create, share, and apply knowledge to make Iowa and the world a better place, the University Library works to ensure the free dissemination and preservation of the university’s research and scholarly outputs.

Iowa State University has been supporting the Open Library of Humanities since 2018 as a regular supporter and has voluntarily decided to increase its membership rate in order to contribute to the expanding of our portfolio of open access journals. In May 2021 we launched our new agreement with Jisc Collections, giving UK institutions the opportunity to voluntarily support us at a higher level (either Gold, Silver or Bronze) enabling us to expand our portfolio of open access journals. Institutions, worldwide, can also contribute at a higher level to facilitate flipping journals to open access. Iowa State University is the second institution from outside the UK that is contributing at a higher membership rate. Thanks to this contribution and the other 12 higher supporters, we will be able to continue expanding portfolio of diamond open access via our journal flipping programme, which is currently welcoming expressions of interest from subscription journals interested in becoming open access. …”

Passed our 100-member milestone for Adoptees of the Statement of Principles! – Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications

“C4DISC is honored and excited to announce that we’ve passed our 100-member milestone! The Coalition was founded by 10 trade and professional associations across the publishing and scholarly communications industry. We set out to discuss and address the diversity and inclusion issues we face as a community….”

ScholarLed welcomes new member presses: African Minds and mediastudies.press

ScholarLed are delighted to announce that two additional scholar-led presses will be joining our consortium: African Minds and mediastudies.press.

African Minds is a not-for-profit, open access publisher based in Cape Town, South Africa. They publish predominantly in the social sciences and their authors are typically African academics and thinkers, as well as international academics who have a close affinity with the continent. They offer a new publishing channel to authors frustrated by a lack of support from traditional book publishers as well as with publishing’s anachronistic and lengthy approach to making knowledge available.

mediastudies.press is a new, open-access publisher for the media and communication studies fields. Launched in 2019, the press is nonprofit and scholar-led. They publish living works, with iterative updates stitched into their process. And they encourage multi-modal submissions that reflect the mediated environments their authors study. Publishing with mediastudies.press is free on principle. Their aim is to demonstrate, on a small scale, an open-access publishing model supported by libraries rather than author fees. Open access for readers, they believe, should not be traded for new barriers to authorship.

We are also pleased to announce that our board has formally accepted Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, and punctum books as members of ScholarLed. These four presses were founding members of ScholarLed before we registered as a not-for-profit foundation in the Netherlands, and have now formally become members of the foundation as per our constitution and membership criteria.

The Advanced Research Consortium Joins the Open Library Foundation as Project Member | Open Library Foundation

“The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) has joined the Open Library Foundation as a Project Member. By joining the Open Library Foundation, ARC is able to leverage the community of projects that are part of the Open Library Foundation.

The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) serves as a hub of humanities virtual research environments or research nodes. ARC provides support, coordination, and a set of evolving standards for more than 200 digital humanities projects that are open access and peer reviewed by five period-specific and thematic research communities, with more projects and communities joining every year. The ARC Catalog is available through BigDIVA (Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application), a web-based search and discovery service designed for humanities scholars and students….”

Projects | Open Library Foundation

“Project members are communities that build or support open source software for libraries or within the information science space and call the Foundation their administrative home.

The Foundation supports these projects in a variety of ways and project members have access to professional services that the Foundation provides.”