The cost of open access to Germany research and educational intuitions
There are two avenues for publishing open access articles: The Gold and Green open access. Access to open access journals is free of charge. Nonetheless, there is always cost associated with publishing or disseminating open access articles. There is no publication cost for Green open access articles- they are uploaded in institutional repositories without undergoing rigorous process of peer review and publishing. But there is a cost for depositing and disseminating articles. However, Gold open access (fully and hybrid open access journals) comes with a significant publishing cost, which is Article Processing Charges (APCs).
Average APCs
The cost usually ranges from $1000 to $3000 depending on the quality (impact factor) of journals. Yet some countries have APC cap. For instance, a maximum fee that Germany institutions pay for APCs is € 2000.
Article Processing Charges are usually covered by authors, educational/research institutions or by funding agencies. European Union makes APCs available through Horizon2020 program. Research funding agencies such as Jisc, Bill and Melinda Gates also cover APC related costs. Obviously, educational and research institutions pay millions for subscription to get access to non-open access journals. On top of this, some institutions pay APCs. This cost can be significant to institutions. However, how significant this cost is? This is the question that Najko Jahn and Marco Tullney’s study attempted to address.
The Cost of Open Access
For instance, between 2005 and 2015 Germany educational and research institutions paid APCs amounted to € 9,627,537 to cover APCs for 7,417 articles. Out of the total paid for APCs, €3,661,120 (2,856 articles) came from Max Planck Institute. Most of the APCs went to fully and hybrid open access journal publishers. Springer Nature and Public Library of Science (PLoS) received about 54 per cent of the APCs from Germany institutions.
Study by Najko Jahn and Marco Tullney revealed that hybrid journals charge more APCs than fully open access journals. They found out that Germany institutions prefer to publish on fully open access journals. In contrast, the UK and Australian institutions mostly pay APCs to hybrid open access journals.
As indicated above, research institutions are spending significant amount of money to realize open access. What is not clear yet is that how much this effort is encouraging researchers to publish on either fully or hybrid journals. Source
Nextstrain.org wins Open Science Prize
Nextstrain.org, a website that enables researchers visualize and track virus evolution in real time, has won Open Science Prize. Nextstrain.org’s model integrates shared and open data from various global research teams to facilitate pathogen surveillance and epidemiological investigations, PLOS reports.
Currently, Nextstrain.org is tracking the evolution of Ebola, Zika, Avian Influenza and Influenza viruses. Its data set comes from data that scientists deposited in Genbank or posted to lab websites or GitHub.
The main goal of the website is to improve epidemiological understanding and improve outbreak response.
According to PLOS, Trevor Bedford, the leader of the team that won the prize says that sharing data publicly and quickly may have a potential for real world impact.
Open Science Prize is an initiative of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Wellcome Trust. Those organizations fund research and advocate for open access to scientific publications. Moreover, they provide financial support for authors to encourage them publish their research output on open access platforms. See sources
Berkeley | The University Library at UC Berkeley took a major step today in its commitment to achieving universal open access for scholarly journal literature by signing the OA2020 Expression of Interest, in collaboration with UC Davis and UC San Francisco.
OA2020 is an international movement, led by the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, to convert the entire corpus of scholarly journal literature to open access by the year 2020. Open access promotes free, immediate access to research articles and the rights to use these articles to advance knowledge worldwide. OA2020 is a framework to achieve open access, and one solution for the rising costs of subscription journals and the need for reduced barriers in accessing and reusing information.
“Our mission, as scholars and educators, is to generate new knowledge for the benefit of the world,” explains Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and professor of economics and information. “Much of the world can’t read our publications. They can’t get access because they can’t afford it. As the nation’s premier public research university, we need to be leaders in the effort to change that.”
When an institution joins the OA2020 movement, it agrees to make a good faith effort to devise and implement practical strategies and actions for attaining universal open access for scholarly journal literature. OA2020 provides the flexibility for institutions to define for themselves how they will repurpose their journal subscription funds to support open access publishing.