The American Chemical Society Offers a New Twist on the Article Processing Charge: An Interview with Sarah Tegen

ACS is proposing what they call Author Development Charges (ADC’s).  These are fees promised to the publisher, prior to peer review, that will allow the author to buy-out the embargo from the publisher. This will be critical for authors who are required to make publicly funded research available immediately. Tegen acknowledges, that there are still other routes to open access.

What jumped out at me in the article is this opening question and answer that suggests a large number of institutions (not CUNY, and for good reason) have signed onto transformative (read/publish) agreements:

ACS believes that “more than 90%” of the authors it publishes “have a simple and funded pathway to publish gold OA (OA) in ACS journals.” I’m curious about how you arrived at that statistic – was it via an author survey? Can you tell us more about how you gathered that data? 

ACS has invested significantly in technology and processes to determine an author’s institutional affiliation and funder identity. We cross match this information to our database of ACS-negotiated read and publish agreements and funder access requirements. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of authors who are subject to an OA mandate have a funded solution through an institutional read and publish agreement, and one-fifth (21%) through OA funding support.

Beth

 

The American Chemical Society Offers a New Twist on the Article Processing Charge: An Interview with Sarah Tegen

ACS is proposing what they call Author Development Charges (ADC’s).  These are fees promised to the publisher, prior to peer review, that will allow the author to buy-out the embargo from the publisher. This will be critical for authors who are required to make publicly funded research available immediately. Tegen acknowledges, that there are still other routes to open access.

What jumped out at me in the article is this opening question and answer that suggests a large number of institutions (not CUNY, and for good reason) have signed onto transformative (read/publish) agreements:

ACS believes that “more than 90%” of the authors it publishes “have a simple and funded pathway to publish gold OA (OA) in ACS journals.” I’m curious about how you arrived at that statistic – was it via an author survey? Can you tell us more about how you gathered that data? 

ACS has invested significantly in technology and processes to determine an author’s institutional affiliation and funder identity. We cross match this information to our database of ACS-negotiated read and publish agreements and funder access requirements. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of authors who are subject to an OA mandate have a funded solution through an institutional read and publish agreement, and one-fifth (21%) through OA funding support.

Beth

 

[Jill Cirasella (she/her)]

Ugh, this is horrific. But part of me always marvels at traditional publishers’ ability to dream up ever more unfriendly terms and payment structures–twists that most of us never saw coming. These publishers have, year after year, been fiendishly good at playing three-dimensional scholcomm chess with authors, readers, libraries, and funders.