Journal subscription fees at the Library have exploded in recent years. How much does all of this cost?
What costs more? Journal subscription fees vs. X – a quiz | University of Virginia Library
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Category Archives: oa.subscriptions
OLH reopens applications to flip subscription journals to open access | Open Library of Humanities
We are delighted to announce that the Open Library of Humanities is now open to expressions of interest from subscription journals in the humanities seeking to move to a gold open access (OA) publishing model without author-facing charges (‘diamond’ OA).
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). We are funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined us in our mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future. Our mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever.
CEU Press’ Opening the Future programme hits funding target for 2nd and 3rd books
We are pleased to announce that Opening the Future at Central European University Press has already accrued enough library support to fund two more open access monographs, taking the total funded so far to three. This is hot on the heels of our June announcement on funding our first OA book; the programme is gaining momentum and already making a difference.
Opening the Future at CEU Press is a cost-effective way for libraries to increase their digital collections on the history and culture of Central and Eastern Europe and the former communist countries. Subscribing libraries get unlimited multi-user access to curated packages of books, with perpetual access after three years. The Press uses membership funds to produce new frontlist titles in open access (OA) format. All OA titles will be available via Project MUSE OAPEN, and DOAB. Today’s announcement sees the following two new OA titles funded by those subscriptions and forthcoming in November 2021:
Constructing Identities over Time: “Bad Gypsies” and “Good Roma” in Russia and Hungary, Jekatyerina Dunajeva
Everyday Life under Communism and After: Consumption and Lifestyle in Hungary, 1945–2000, Tibor Valuch
Author Jekatyerina Dunajeva said:
“It is an honour to have my book published in Open Access. I frequently receive emails from scholars around the world asking if I might share my work, often citing prohibitive prices charged for publications. As a researcher of social inequalities, I believe equal access to knowledge is a necessary first step towards an equitable and democratic system of scholarship. Constructing Identities over Time will be part of a newly-launched book series in Critical Romani Studies at CEU Press and I hope that one day more books in the series might also be published OA.”
Further titles will be announced soon and advance notice will be given to avoid any double-dipping. And we are recording our progress along with our plans for OA books in 2021-2022 on the website at https://ceup.openingthefuture.net/forthcoming/.
If you would like to know more about becoming a member of Opening the Future, you can read more about the programme and benefits on the website, or contact Frances Pinter, CEU Press Executive Chair, on pinterf@press.ceu.edu
Attracting new users or business as usual? A case study of converting academic subscription based journals to open access | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press Journals
Abstract: This paper studies a selection of eleven Norwegian journals in the humanities and social sciences and their conversion from subscription to open access, a move heavily incentivized by governmental mandates and open access policies. By investigating the journals’ visiting logs in the period 2014-2019, the study finds that a conversion to open access induces higher visiting numbers; all journals in the study had a significant increase which can be attributed to the conversion. Converting a journal had no spillover in terms of increased visits to previously published articles still behind the paywall in the same journals. Visits from previously subscribing Norwegian higher education institutions did not account for the increase in visits, indicating that the increase must be accounted for by visitors from other sectors. The results could be relevant for policymakers concerning the effects of strict polices targeting economically vulnerable national journals, and could further inform journal owners and editors on the effects of converting to open access.
Open Access surpasses subscription publication globally for the first time | Dimensions
“In the vein of keeping things moving, the Dimensions team has introduced many new features over the last few years. Most recently, they have updated the Open Access classifications in Dimensions and introduced some additional fields that some of you may find helpful.
The Open Access data in Dimensions is sourced from our colleagues at Unpaywall. When we first launched Dimensions, Unpaywall was almost as new as we were, but in the meanwhile, both Unpaywall and Dimensions have moved on. The new release of Dimensions now tracks the Unpaywall OA classifications. This means that the filters in Dimensions should be more consistent and easier to understand – we now have: Green, Bronze, Gold, Hybrid, All OA and Closed. Of course, all the Open Access filters are available in the free version of Dimensions as well.
While we have seen the percentage of OA increasing rapidly in recent years, especially in countries like China, Germany and the UK, it was not until 2020 that more outputs were published through Open Access channels than traditional subscription channels globally….”
University of Iowa: Sunsetting of the Open Access Fund
“For several years, UI Libraries has maintained an Open Access (OA) Fund to help researchers pay for the article processing charges (APCs) on open access publications. This fund supports authors choosing to make their publications open for anyone to read, broadening their audience and providing wide access to important research. We have decided to sunset the OA Fund for APCs within two years due to budget constraints. We found that the fund did nothing to offset our rapidly increasing journal subscription costs. In fact, the fund largely supports the same publishers to which we pay our pricey subscriptions. Given this reality, the final year that funding will be available is 2020, and the amount of funding for 2019 has been reduced from $3,000 per article to $2,000 per article. Additionally, each author will only be eligible to receive funding from the OA fund one time per fiscal year in 2019….”
How to release scholarly communication from subscriptions and copyright retention by publishers to match the EOSC developments? : OpenAIRE blog
Within the European Open Science Cloud, research results in the form of research data will be FAIR in few years. The question is how to release scholarly communication from subscriptions and copyright retention by publishers to match the EOSC developments. The University of Ljubljana suggests that as the first step the European organizations (EC, CESAER, EARTO, EUA, LERU, SE) negotiate with scientific publishers on behalf of the European research performing organizations and research funding organizations for a total transformation from subscription peer-reviewed journals to open access peer-reviewed journals. If adequate agreements are not concluded in a reasonable timeframe to match the EOSC developments, then subscription agreements with publishers should be discontinued and efforts intensified to solidify other outlets of fully open scholarly communication.
Journal publishers’ Big Deals: Are they worth it?
Evaluating the cost/benefit of the ‘Big Deal’ at the Universite de Montreal.
“At each stage of the process of analysis and renegotiations, we created multiple opportunities for discussion among our personnel, the faculty union, departments, senior administrators, and students’ groups. Every effort was made to remind members of our community of their role in the scholarly publishing ecosystem and of the alternatives available to them, starting with Open Access publishing….”