The Pay-It-Forward project at the University of California (UC) is investigating the financial sustainability of the “Gold” model for Open Access (OA), in which journal publishers charge authors an Article Processing Charge (APC) to generate revenue instead of subscriptions. In this breakout session from CNI’s recent membership meeting UC Davis University Librarian MacKenzie Smith and California Digital Library Interim Director Ivy Anderson present an update on the project, including data on journal budgets and expenditures, publishing costs, and attitudes about Gold OA by publishers and authors.
Is Gold Open Access Sustainable? Update from the UC Pay-It-Forward Project is now available online:
Readers may also be interested in a related presentation from CNI’s spring 2015 meeting in Seattle, also by Ivy Anderson, along with Stuart Shieber of Harvard and Ralf Schimmer of the Max Planck Digital Library. Video of
What Price Open Access? is available from CNI’s video channels, and on the project briefing page at
https://wp.me/p1LncT-5BD.
On a related note: A study by the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) and released earlier this year, "Disrupting the subscription journal's business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access” (
http://dx.doi.org/10.17617/1.3), asserts that a transition to open access would be possible at no extra cost. Today, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released a summary of the recently-held Berlin 12 Open Access Conference that was convened to discuss a proposal by the Max Planck Society to flip subscription-based journals to open access models. ARL’s report is available at
http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/2015.12.18-Berlin12Report.pdf.