CUNY Academic Commons

Gosh, this is a great question, and I also wish Megan were here to give you and us some good talking points! I admit I have a raging headache at the moment, so this isn’t going to be a great response, but I want to help you prep for the meeting at least a little…

• I don’t think there’s been much conversation around CUNY about Plan S, as it started as an initiative of Science Europe, and the discussion still mostly concerns European funders. Of course, it’s possible that decisions made by Plan S funding bodies could lead to permanent journal changes for everyone, but it’s not clear that’s going to happen.
• I am generally loath to share posts from the Scholarly Kitchen (if you’re not familiar with SKitch, it’s, well, often a propaganda vehicle for publishers and publishers’ consultants), but I found this round-up of reactions to Plan S pretty informative, since I didn’t track the conversation very carefully myself.
• Many OA skeptics are surprised to learn that the majority of journals listed in DOAJ do not charge APCs. (As of right now, DOAJ has 14,033 journals. 10,227 don’t charge APCs, 3,757 do charge APCs, and there’s no data for 50.) A lot of people conflate “gold OA” with “APC-charging gold OA,” but gold OA absolutely does not imply APCs. Of course, there’s huge variation in how many articles different journals publish (with, for example, PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports publishing huge numbers of articles and Communications in Information Literacy publishing relatively few), and it is the case that most gold OA articles are published by APC-charging journals. Still, the journal-level data is pretty impressive!
• At journals with APCs, increases in APCs are far outpacing inflation, apparently without effect on the volume of articles those journals publish . This suggests to me that the dominant high-profit publishers will continue to dominate, unless researchers and librarians start making radically different choices.
• I personally think that the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts (released in October) is a huge step in the right direction (scroll down to the core principles). It’s already been endorsed by dozens of institutions, and I believe it’s been discussed (at least via email) by CUNY’s Chief Librarians.
• As for APCs at CUNY, I know Maureen shared the other day that John Jay has an APC fund. If there are other APC funds around CUNY, I’m not aware of them. (I have heard about some case-by-case help from CUNY deans and provosts, though.) I believe Megan isn’t pursuing the creation a CUNY-wide APC fund, both because such funds tend to run out of money pretty quickly and because she would rather see CUNY lend its financial support to sustainable, community-led OA endeavors. (I hope I’m representing her views correctly, and I apologize if I’m not!)
• At my campus, I haven’t been asked about APCs by administrators in quite some time, for whatever reason. I do field individual inquiries about APCs fairly regularly, though, and I generally turn the conversation to green OA. Usually they’re amazed to learn what’s possible without having to pay. (Of course, this conversation only works out if we’re talking about APCs for hybrid journals, where the APC is optional. If they’re inquiring about help with a non-optional, non-waivable APC for a fully OA journal, it’s a tougher conversation, and I usually ask if they have grant funds or if a co-author has access to an APC fund.)

I don’t know how helpful this is, but maybe there are a few useful tidbits in here!

Jill