The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is highlighting two approaches to establishing and maintaining open access (OA) funds in a new SPARC Member Profile. The coalition is also preparing to launch a new initiative to provide additional information and resources detailing options for other institutions that may be considering such funds.
Last year, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Calgary were among a handful of institutions that established pools of money, through their libraries, to cover the cost of OA journal fees. This approach – aimed at supporting a new academic publishing model that could ultimately relieve at least some of the burden of expensive journal subscriptions – has reportedly been well-received by researchers on these two campuses.
At UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) provides faculty, post-doc and graduate students up to $3,000 to cover the cost of publishing an article in an OA publication. It also offers up to $1,500 for opening an article that requires copyright transfer to the publisher. During the 18-month pilot project, the fund covered 52 articles at an average cost of $1,500 for OA publications and $1,280 for articles requiring copyright transfer. During Calgary’s first 13 months, the library’s Open Access Authors Fund received 67 official submissions to cover OA fees at an average cost of $1,538 (in Canadian dollars).
The cost of journal subscriptions at times is crippling for libraries and the Canadian university wanted to experiment with a different way of encouraging OA. The Berkeley initiative set out to encourage a more sustainable scholarly communication environment. The new SPARC resource for OA funds will be announced this fall.
Search for more such open access products/services in K-Store
Discuss this NEWS
