Open Access and Author Fees

As some journals move from their subscription or pay-per-view model to the “gold” path of the Open Access movement, many have required a submission fee from authors to have an accepted article appear.  While some grants allow for actual grant funds to be used to cover these charges, not all authors have access to such funds.  Some universities, usually via the library, are paying submission fees for the authors from their institutions. In Canada, the first institution to set up such a program is the University of Calgary. The University of Calgary announced that their Open Access Authors Fund will cover submission fees for accepted articles that are slated to appear in fully open access journals and in “hybrid” open access journals that offer institutional subscription rebates based on the take up of their open access option. The University of Calgary is the sixth institution worldwide to create a submission fee support program.

It’s good to see some libraries are prepared to respond to these new publishing models that have been created with open access.  Open access, like open source software, doesn’t mean that there are no longer costs involved or that all costs have been completely eliminated.  Nothing is entirely free, but the model does create certain freedoms for the end user or consumer of information.  As many scholars and publishers know, there are still many very real costs involved in producing a journal — even an online journal.

Still, as we move to these new publishing models, where do such things as memberships fit in where a journal or publisher offers a discount to an institution who purchase a block of memberships ahead of time? BioMedCentral uses “prepay membership” and “postpay membership”.  Many new questions arise as these begin to seem a good deal like traditional subscriptions to journals, especially when libraries are involved with payments.  While many authors in an institution may often end up publishing in the same non-open access journal, is this likely to create more of a monoculture or bias towards publishing in certain journals with prepay membership arrangements?  While publishers and journal aggregators have been somewhat obligated to provide libraries with usage statistics with subscription journals, will such statistics be provided or even meaningful to individual libraries?  The question becomes now what  – there are still costs and we have shifted the emphasis of certain costs, but have gained any overall ground on this very slippery slope?