SAGE Reduces Processing Fee for Open Access Journal
SAGE has significantly lowered the processing fee it charges to scholars who submit papers to its open access journal, SAGE Open.
SAGE Open, which launched in May 2011, is a peer-reviewed open access publication for the humanities and social and behavioral sciences. Since its founding, SAGE Open has received more than 1,400 manuscripts and published more than 160 of them.
Until today, the standard processing fee for a manuscript was $695, though an introductory rate of $395 was in effect as of yesterday. Now, the fee will be reduced to $99 per manuscript.
According to SAGE, the move was predicated in part on the financial realities of academic publishing, which have placed the burden of expenses such as manuscript processing fees on faculty. A survey of published authors found that 70 percent of them had to pay the processing fee out of pocket. SAGE also reported, "Author declarations further show that less than 15 percent of all articles published across SAGE's Humanities and Social Sciences portfolio in 2012 had allocated funding."
"With the current increase in demand for open access publication, we recognize that this move is needed urgently: more scholars are being required by their institutions or funders to make research immediately available, without any funding being made available to support them," according to Ziyad Marar, SAGE's global publishing director.
"This move ensures that authors are able to publish their research Open Access, while maintaining the same standard of high quality peer review, copy editing, typesetting, and electronic delivery you would expect of SAGE as a premier social science publisher," Bob Howard, SAGE's vice president of US journals, said in a prepared statement.
Additional details can be found on the SAGE Open portal.