UC Davis, CDL to Lead Major Project to Build Open Access Financial Model
(Davis, CA) – The University of California, Davis and the California Digital Library (CDL) will lead a major new project, with an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to help define the future of Open Access to scholarship. Pay It Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article Processing Charges for Large North American Research Institutions is a year-long effort to study the implications of new funding models for scholarly communications, particularly the use of article processing charges, and determine their sustainability for research universities in the U.S. and Canada. The project partnership includes three major research libraries (Harvard University, Ohio State University and the University of British Columbia) as well as the ten University of California campuses. The project will create a detailed, flexible, and publicly available financial model to help university administrators and librarians develop Open Access policies and strategies.
“Research libraries are excited by the prospect of free Open Access to scholarly journals but worry that financing it via article processing charges (APCs) may become even more expensive than the current journal subscription model, particularly for large research universities like the University of California and our partners,” said MacKenzie Smith, UC Davis’ University Librarian and lead investigator. “Our mission as libraries is to insure access to research, and Open Access is a promising means to that end. But we must be proactive in working with the publishing community to achieve that goal in a sustainable manner. Providing access to published research is increasingly unaffordable, even for the wealthiest institutions, and the information that this project will develop is critical to help the research community continue to provide access to research results in an Open Access future.”
The project brings together a group of scholarly communications experts, including Greg Tananbaum (ScholarNext), Dr. David Solomon (Michigan State University), Dr. Bo-Christer Björk (Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland), Dr. Mark McCabe (University of Michigan and Boston University), and Dr. Carol Tenopir (University of Tennessee, Knoxville). The team will create both an in-depth qualitative analysis of authors’ attitudes towards Open Access publishing fees and a detailed financial model of these fees relative to current library journal budgets and additional funding sources. The project will also collaborate with information providers Elsevier (Scopus) and Thomson Reuters (Web of Science) as well as the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, whose membership includes several hundred scholarly and professional publishers. The team will build a series of models depicting the social and financial impact of a largely APC-funded publishing landscape on the institutions participating in the study under a variety of assumptions and across different academic disciplines.
“Our hope is that we can develop a model that can aid the community in developing a balanced view of publication costs and how they can be shared in a reasonable way among libraries, funders, publishers and authors,” said Laine Farley, Executive Director of the California Digital Library. “Because our institutions represent the full spectrum of disciplines, we also want to identify approaches that can take into account differences in publication patterns and funding options among them.”
The project came out of a 2013 planning effort that looked at the institutional costs of converting scholarly communications, particularly scholarly journals, to an entirely Article Processing Charge business model, often referred to as “Gold Open Access.” In that funding model, researchers—generally with support from their institutions or funders—pay in advance to publish, enabling readers to access published articles for free from the publisher’s web site or another scholarly repository. Researchers at the University of California author a large proportion of the scholarly literature and are strong supporters of Open Access, as evidenced by the UC faculty Senate’s recent Open Access policy, but the implications of converting the cost of scholarly communications to an “author pays” model are significant for large research institutions that generate a disproportionate amount of the scholarly literature. While APCs are not the only means to achieve Open Access, the model is becoming increasingly prevalent in other parts of the world, making it important to understand its potential implications for North American universities. Finding the right financial model to pay for scholarly communication while making it more accessible requires significantly more evaluation before any model can be universally accepted.
About UC Davis
UC Davis is a global community of individuals united to better humanity and our natural world while seeking solutions to some of our most pressing challenges. Located near the California state capital, UC Davis has more than 34,000 students in four colleges and six professional school schools. The campus has an annual research budget of over $750 million, a comprehensive health system and about two dozen specialized research centers that lead nationally and internationally recognized research projects studying issues effecting academic and research libraries around the world. The UC Davis University Library is among the top 100 research libraries in North America, and belongs to the Association of Research Libraries, the Digital Library Federation, and other organizations that position it to collaborate with other top organizations.
About the California Digital Library
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997 to take advantage of emerging technologies that transform the way digital information is published and accessed. Since then, in collaboration with the UC libraries and other partners, the CDL has assembled one of the world’s largest digital research libraries and changed the ways that faculty, students, and researchers discover and access information.
More information is available at the project’s web page: http://payitforward-project.ucdavis.edu.