# Plan T: Scrap APCs and Fund Open Access with Submission Fees – The Scholarly Kitchen

“APCs have the unfortunate feature that the authors pay for the assessment of all the other submissions that ended up being rejected. Manuscripts rejected from multiple OA journals thus contribute to the APCs of several different authors. Is it fair for authors of good articles to pay for the peer review of others’ lower quality work? Moreover, journals that do lots of peer review to find one acceptable article have higher APCs, as illustrated by the figure below….

Breaking down an APC and how it relates to submission numbers and acceptance rates suggests another way to cover publication costs: a submission fee of $350 and a publication fee of$850 would generate the same revenue as the current APCs at these journals. (This approach has been suggested before, see herehere, and here.)…

The introduction of submission fees also affects submission patterns, most notably by steering away articles with only slim chances of acceptance. This effect would change the calculations in the figure above: fewer low quality articles arrive, so acceptance rates rise and hence reduce income from submission fees. However, a drop in submissions also means a drop in costs, as those weak articles no longer need to be processed through the system….

# Community Cultivation: A Field Guide

“Innovators abound in the fields of libraries, archives, museums, publishing, and higher education. Many of these idea generators find ample support for the creation of tools and technologies that enable new forms of knowledge production, dissemination, or preservation as those tools are first imagined and piloted.

However, when these innovators attempt to sustain their creations, external funding and attention often wane. A well-documented “Valley of Death” stretches between softfunded projects and sustainable programs. Without deep knowledge of how to build a support community, and how to manage such elements as resources, communications, engagement, and governance, innovators find the bridge between grant funding and ongoing operations very difficult to cross….

Many potential tools and services wither, not due to shortfalls in demand or shortcomings in those products, but rather to a lack of attention to organization and community building….

We [at Educopia] are now openly sharing the model that we have developed and refined over the last twelve years. Community Cultivation – A Field Guide provides a powerful lens that can provide both emerging and established communities with ways to understand, evaluate, and plan their own growth, change, and maturation. We are offering this Field Guide freely in the hope that it will empower more community facilitators and leaders to invest in the health and sustainability of their own collaborative networks….”

# Draft ACRL Scholarly Communications Research Agenda Feedback Due Jan 4 – ACRL Insider

Rebecca Kennison and Nancy Maron, selected by ACRL to design, develop, and deliver a new research agenda for scholarly communications and the research environment, have been hard at work since March 2018 with guidance and input from ACRL’s Research and Scholarly Environment Committee (ReSEC). ACRL is now seeking public comment on a draft document by COB Friday, January 4, 2019….

By sharing this draft publicly for feedback, ACRL seeks to continue the robust community engagement, which has included input from over 1,000 individuals via expert interviews, online focus groups, a survey, and large group conversations at major conferences. ACRL wants the final document to be as helpful as possible both in guiding academic librarians on actions that can be taken now to promote a more open system of scholarship and identifying essential areas that merit further investigation….”