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the current subscription income comes from overseas. Hence the suggestion that open access might apply only to the research articles published, not to the reviews and other material. Another suggestion is that open access might be restricted to the UK (together with those developing countries that already enjoy access under one of the Research for Life[1] and similar schemes), in which case the level of APC would be much lower, and potentially sustainable. Such a move would not, of course, meet the objective of increasing global access to UK research outputs.
7.8. A third suggestion is that instead of charging an APC once an article has been accepted for publication, journals should levy a fee when authors submit an article. Submission fees are already quite common in certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the life sciences. A recent report[2] found that that there could be benefits to publishers in certain cases (particularly for journals with high rejection rates) to switch to such a model, not least in enabling them to set APCs much lower than they would otherwise have to be. But the risks, particularly those involved in any transition, are seen by publishers to outweigh the perceived benefits. Moreover, the advantages offered by submission fees do not provide publishers and authors—who might decide, after paying for peer review not to proceed to publication—with direct incentives to change to open access. From the perspective of authors and of funders, the financial risks of submitting an article for publication would become greater under such arrangements. We have therefore not considered submission fees as an option in our deliberations.
Policies and arrangements for payment
7.9. We have already noted (Section 4) that policies and arrangements for the payment of APCs are unsystematic and ill-understood, and that they are thus a major barrier to the adoption of open access publishing. We therefore welcome the proposals to address this issue that are emerging from discussions with the Research Councils. The precise policies and processes have still to be worked out, but it is essential that they should allow flexibility to universities, so that they can establish their own policies and procedures for the payment of APCs; if they do so, they will provide a significant stimulus to open access publishing.
7.10. It is envisaged that universities should respond to the proposed new policies and arrangements from the Research Councils with policies of their own to establish open access publication as the primary means of publishing and dissemination, with dedicated institutional funds to support it. If universities are allowed sufficient flexibility in the use of moneys from the Research Councils, Funding Councils and other sources, the new policies may be adopted both for research projects funded by the Research Councils or other external funds, and also for the research that has no dedicated source of funding, where the costs are met from the
- ↑ HINARI in medicine, AGORA in agriculture, OARE in environmental sciences, and ARDI in development and innovation. http://www.research4life.org/
- ↑ Mark Ware Consulting Ltd, Submission Fees: a tool in the transition to open access? , Knowledge Exchange, 2010
