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Another APC Question (APCs & Awards)

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  • December 11, 2019 at 2:45 pm #82177
    Nancy Foasberg
    Participant

    I really appreciated both Anne’s question and Jill’s answer in this thread, and now that I’m facing a somewhat similar situation, I wanted to ask for more feedback.

    I’m on a recently-formed, campus-wide committee focused on supporting faculty research at Queens College, chaired by our new Associate Provost for Research.  It is a VERY INTERESTING committee! One of the first things it’s done is to institute small awards that faculty can apply for.

    As the lead-up to this post suggests, one faculty member has asked for the award to help defray APC costs. A few details:

    • The journal in question is fully open access, but is published by a commercial publisher who charges very high APCs
    • Since the award is quite small, the amount that the faculty member has requested does not actually even come close to covering the entire APC.  (in fact, the faculty member will request that 50% of the APC be waived, and the amount of the award still won’t even cover half of the reduced APC!!)
    • This is not the only journal being published in this area, but the faculty member really wants to publish in this specific journal due to its high impact factor.

    Since this is a relatively new award, I think I’m in a position to influence how it’ll be used, not just in this particular case, but in the future. We haven’t discussed APCs in the committee yet at all.

    My impulse is to make some recommendations about what kinds of APCs the award can be used to pay, and maybe to ask that we suggest to the faculty member that they also deposit their work in CAW, but I also feel like this is a good opportunity to have a larger conversation about the scholarly publication landscape with some faculty members (and one administrator) who are pretty dialed in and are definitely interested in these issues.

    So I guess what I’m asking is how I should frame that conversation, and whether there are other approaches I should consider taking to this particular case.

    December 11, 2019 at 6:04 pm #82190
    Jill Cirasella (she/her)
    Member

    You might want to look at the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity: http://www.oacompact.org/compact/

    It seems like it’s lost momentum (either the website isn’t being maintained or they haven’t had a new signatory since 2014…), but even if that’s the case, there are some good takeaways.

    Signatories can have different interpretations and implementations of the Compact, but most share these four requirements:

    • Journal must be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
    • Journal must be a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association or adhere to its Code of Conduct.
    • Journal must provide unfettered access to all peer-reviewed articles.
    • Journal must have publicly available standard article fee schedule.

    …and some (e.g., Cornell, University of Rhode Island) also have a requirement along these lines:

    • Journal must have a policy to waive fees in the case of financial hardship.

    I was always intrigued by that additional clause, that some institutions decided they would fund APCs only for journals that are willing to waive them for others. It was a clever way to influence journal policy, I thought: the institution’s willingness to pay is predicated on the journal’s willingness to waive. Indeed, in my opinion, signatories with that requirement are the only signatories that really support equity (rather than just supporting their own authors and the OA journals in which they publish).

    That said, it’d been a while since I’d clicked through the list of signatories and looked at their policies. If memory serves me, there used to be a lot more that had that fifth clause. And now only a few do (and there’s a bunch of dead links too). I don’t know the reason why that fifth clause is disappearing, but it could be that fewer OA journals than before offer waivers…

     

    December 12, 2019 at 2:25 pm #82259
    Monica Berger (She/her/hers)
    Participant

    There might be some useful info on Simmons OA Directory wiki http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_publication_funds in terms of other public institutions’ policies.

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