UC Davis Project Looks at Real Cost of Open Access Publishing

The concept of "open access" doesn't necessarily equate to free — at least not for the universities that are publishing the scholarship. A new project based at the University of California, Davis will research just what an article processing charge (APC) model would actually cost large North American institutions. The goal is to figure out how sustainable and desirable the APC model would be for those schools, as well as authors and publishers, compared to current subscription costs for comparable content.

In the APC model, also called "gold open access," authors pay their publishers in advance to publish research — typically with the support of their institutions or funders. By paying in advance, they ensure that readers gain free access to the work through the publisher's Web site or a scholarly repository. According to a document that lays out the scope of the project, typical publication fees are about $3,000 for hybrid open access journals — subscription journals that allow selected articles to be published via APC. However, noted the researchers, that amount varies by journal and discipline.

Researchers at the University of California (UC) System, which is a major supporter of open access, publish a large proportion of the scholarly literature — nearly two percent of the total in large publisher bundles licensed by the California Digital Library; that percentage is even higher in the most prestigious journals.

While UC Davis' University Library and the California Digital Library will lead the project, other participants include The Ohio State University, the University of British Columbia and Harvard. The work is being funded with an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Through a series of focus groups and surveys, as well as data collection, the partners will produce a financial model to help university administrators and librarians develop open access policies and strategies.

Besides experts in scholarly communications, the project will also explore authors' attitudes toward open access publishing fees and collaborate with information providers Elsevier, which produces Scopus; Thomson Reuters, which produces Web of Science; and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, whose membership includes several hundred scholarly and professional publishers.

"Research libraries are excited by the prospect of free open access to scholarly journals but worry that financing it via article processing charges 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 of the project. "Our mission as libraries is to ensure 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."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • AI robot with cybersecurity symbol on its chest

    Microsoft Adds New Agentic AI Tools to Security Copilot

    Microsoft has announced a major expansion of its AI-powered cybersecurity platform, introducing a suite of autonomous agents to help organizations counter rising threats and manage the growing complexity of cloud and AI security.

  • modern college building with circuit and brain motifs

    Anthropic Launches Claude for Education

    Anthropic has announced a version of its Claude AI assistant tailored for higher education institutions. Claude for Education "gives academic institutions secure, reliable AI access for their entire community," the company said, to enable colleges and universities to develop and implement AI-enabled approaches across teaching, learning, and administration.

  • central cloud platform connected to various AI icons—including a brain, robot, and network nodes

    Linux Foundation to Host Protocol for AI Agent Interoperability

    The Linux Foundation has announced it will host the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol project, an open standard originally developed by Google to support secure communication and interoperability among AI agents.

  • open laptop in a college classroom with holographic AI icons like a brain and data charts rising from the screen

    4 Ways Universities Are Using Google AI Tools for Learning and Administration

    In a recent blog post, Google shared an array of education customer stories, showcasing ways institutions are using AI tools like Gemini and NotebookLM to transform both learning and administrative tasks.