A new open access (OA) model based on whether an author’s institution has a subscription to the Journal of Experimental Botany has been launched by its publisher Oxford Journals. Articles published in the journal will be made freely available on an OA basis to the author’s institution, provided it has a subscription to the journal.
“The idea was it would enable us to build subscriptions in a climate where subscription numbers are inevitably declining, and have been for five years or more,” said Jerry Roberts, editor-in-chief of the journal.
The decision follows a pilot which offered open access for articles if authors paid a £250 fee for each paper.
Under the new model, authors who want their articles to be made freely available online, but whose institutions do not have a subscription to the journal, have to pay £1,500.
Kirsty Luff, senior communications and marketing manager at Oxford Journals , said that the initiative would benefit all parties.
“It is one way we can ensure we keep our subscriptions, but also the libraries get something back as well,” she said. “Authors won’t need to go through the process of paying for each paper they want to be open access , and it will hugely benefit those institutions with a large number of authors who do want this facility.”
Roberts said the success of the new model would be assessed after a year.
“Linking OA to subscriptions is sustainable as long as publishers convince librarians to pay subscription costs,” Roberts said, but added if subscriptions continued to fall because of OA content , the model would fail.
“It wouldn’t be sustainable if subscription costs fell by half because half the papers in a particular publication were OA,” he said.
reader comments