Category Archives: oa.prices

Un accord de 4 ans entre Elsevier et la recherche française – The Sound Of Science

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“Unlike institutions Swedish and Norwegian or at universities such as California , academic institutions and research French have agreed in principle by the voice of their consortium Couperin, for the renewal of a national license with Elsevier.

In a letter sent April 11 to the scientific publisher that Sound Of Science has procured, Lise Dumasy, president of the consortium, details the terms of the agreement whose duration is 4 years, effective from January 1 2019.

With this agreement, French research institutions will have access to the publisher’s “Freeedom complete edition” magazine package, Lancet included, French Medical Library and Cell Press. However, the consortium does not guarantee the publisher that all its members will adhere to the national license….

This agreement provides for a gradual decrease in license costs of 13.3% spread over 4 years….

The agreement provides for Elsevier to make a 25% rebate on its Article processing charge ( APC ), which can be translated as an Item Processing Fee, which is the price paid by a researcher’s laboratory when it publishes in some journals in Open Access…

A highlight of the agreement is what is known as “green open access”. This term originally refers to how to force open publication of scientific articles by publishing “author” versions of scientific articles. Indeed, the law Republic digital provides that the researchers have the right to publish their article without the modifications that the editor has added (that it is corrections of form or form) after 6 months in STEM (science, technology , engineering and mathematics) and after 12 months in SHS (human and social sciences).

Here, the agreement provides for setting up automatic can access after 12 months’ author manuscript accepted “( MAA ) or postprint streaming directly Sciencedirect, the platform from Elsevier and a manual HAL ( the CNRS open archive ) which points to this streaming. Then, in a second time and after 24 months, the pdf file of this manuscript would be found directly on the HAL platform.

This agreement allows Elsevier to urge French researchers not to worry about the deposit of their articles in “green openaccess” by providing a service that does so but with a broader embargo than allowed by law and in streaming and no with the pdf file accessible directly….”

Are Mirror Journals Just Hybrid Open Access Journals In Disguise Or Are They A Viable Route To The Open Access Future? | A Way of Happening

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“Developments in the open access world seem to be moving at a lightning pace lately. Plan S has added a realism and urgency to OA discussions. Never to be behind on any ‘scholcomm’ development, Elsevier has started a pilot program of launching what they are calling ‘Mirror Journals’.  Open Access (OA) ‘copies’ of existing peer reviewed journals. Journals that are “fully gold open access but share the same editorial board, aims and scope and peer review policies as their existing “parent” journals – and the same level of visibility and discoverability.”

Angela Cochrane gave a good analysis of Mirror Journals as a route to the full OA future in October. Worth a read! She argues that Mirror Journals have the potential to solve several problems publisher face when trying to publish OA, including accusations of double-dipping and the steep challenge of starting a new OA journal from scratch….”

Deal or No Deal | Periodicals Price Survey 2019

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“Pressure increases on publishers to move more quickly to open access, but this leaves many questions unanswered

For the past decade, libraries have battled declining university budgets and increasing serials expenditures. With each Big Deal package renewal or cancellation, librarians and publishers have asked themselves: Did I make the best deal? Did I make the right deal? Recent developments in open access (OA) promise to bring major reform to academic publishing and, with that, new challenges and opportunities to the way that librarians and publishers choose to deal….”

bjoern.brembs.blog » New England Journal of Medicine – and you thought Nature was expensive?

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“The New England journal of Medicine has come out strongly against Open Access. Apparently, this journal does not seem to value access to medical information very highly. This lack of valuation could be due to several reasons. For one, the NEJM is leading the medical publishing industry in retractions….

Finally and perhaps equally likely (the reasons are, of course, not mutually exclusive) it could simply be about money….

Salary sum: 4,088,010….

This would amount to an article processing charge (APC) for NEJM of around US$314,000.

Or, phrased differently, the current business model of NEJM entails the tax-payer paying more than US$300k for each research article in NEJM, which, at the same time:

 

  • pays their management staff the 3-7 fold income of one of their professor-authors
  • for each research-type article, cross-subsidizes about four other news-type or opinion articles, some of which insult scientists
  • pays for the rejection costs of 95% of all submitted articles
  • overpays the actual publishing costs by about 1,200-fold …”

 

Why does it cost millions to access publicly funded research papers? Blame the paywall | CBC News

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“Canada’s academic librarians are cheering from the sidelines now that the University of California has cancelled its subscriptions with the academic publishing giant Elsevier.

It was a clash of titans as the largest public university in the U.S. pushed back against a multi-million dollar paywall blocking open access to the world’s scientific knowledge.

“People were following it very closely,” said Mary-Jo Romaniuk, librarian and vice-provost at the University of Calgary. “This may be the start of things to come.”

Tension has been building for years over the gradual privatization of academic literature which has resulted in a handful of powerful international publishing companies controlling the dissemination of research. …
 

Increasingly, public funding agencies are requiring scientists to make their research freely available as a condition for receiving grants.

All three of Canada’s major research funding agencies — the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) — have an open access requirement. Any research funded since 2015 must be freely available within 12 months.

So far, CIHR estimates that about 60 per cent of its researchers have complied.”

Why does it cost millions to access publicly funded research papers? Blame the paywall | CBC News

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“Canada’s academic librarians are cheering from the sidelines now that the University of California has cancelled its subscriptions with the academic publishing giant Elsevier.

It was a clash of titans as the largest public university in the U.S. pushed back against a multi-million dollar paywall blocking open access to the world’s scientific knowledge.

“People were following it very closely,” said Mary-Jo Romaniuk, librarian and vice-provost at the University of Calgary. “This may be the start of things to come.”

Tension has been building for years over the gradual privatization of academic literature which has resulted in a handful of powerful international publishing companies controlling the dissemination of research. …
 

Increasingly, public funding agencies are requiring scientists to make their research freely available as a condition for receiving grants.

All three of Canada’s major research funding agencies — the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) — have an open access requirement. Any research funded since 2015 must be freely available within 12 months.

So far, CIHR estimates that about 60 per cent of its researchers have complied.”

OE [Open Education] Day at UTA [U of Texas at Arlington]

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Abstract:  We’ll define open educational resources (OER), examine the impact of OER use in higher education, discuss copyright and open licensing, and explore avenues for identifying existing OER that can be remixed and reused. The presentation will cover updates on federal and state OER initiatives and highlight support for open educational practices at UTA, including access to and technical support for Pressbooks, a web-based publishing platform.

bjoern.brembs.blog » How publishers keep fooling academics

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“Time and time again, academic publishers have managed to create the impression that publishing incurs a lot of costs which justify the outrageous prices they charge, be that US$11M p.a. for an Elsevier Big Deal subscription or an article processing charge (APC) of US$5,200 for a Nature Communications article.

This week, again, an academic publisher, SpringerNature, reaffirmed its readers that they have huge costs that necessitate the price they charge. This time, the publisher repeated their testimony from 2004 that “they have high internal costs” that amount to €10,000-30,000 per published article….

This means that what the publishers are referring to isn’t their costs for publishing at all, it is the price that they charge the public for all of their services.

It is well established that the cost of making an article public with all the bells and whistles that come with an academic article is between US$/€200-500. This is the item one would reasonably call “publication costs”. Because they are so low, this item cannot be the main reason for the price of a typical Nature branded article. SpringerNature performs additional services, some of which are somewhat related to the publication process, other not so much….”

Deal reveals what scientists in Germany are paying for open access | Science | AAAS

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“Project Deal, a consortium of libraries, universities, and research institutes in Germany, has unveiled an unprecedented deal with a major journal publisher—Wiley—that is drawing close scrutiny from advocates of open access to scientific papers….

Now, the numbers are out. Germany will pay Wiley €2750 for each paper published in one of the publisher’s so-called hybrid journals, which contain both paywalled and free papers. The contract anticipates researchers will publish about 9500 such papers per year, at a cost of €26 million. In addition, researchers will get a 20% discount on the price of publishing in Wiley journals that are already open access.

 

The deal is an important step toward more open access in scientific publishing, but the per paper fee of €2750 seems high, says Leo Waaijers, an open-access advocate and retired librarian at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Dutch researchers are paying Wiley just €1600 per paper under a similar deal in the Netherlands, he notes. “It’s the same process, the same product, so why the price difference?” he says….

The fact that the details of the German contract have become public is also important, Borrell-Damian says. “Contracts should be public because this is about public money spent,” she says. And if other countries sign similar deals, and the details become public, then “the whole game of price comparison may start,” Waaijers says. And that, open-access advocates say, could produce pressure for even lower publishing fees.”