Paying for the Open Journal of Astrophysics
A couple of days ago I received an email from a publisher offering to buy the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This happens from time to time, but it’s interesting to see the offer price increasing. This time it was for $150,000. I don’t know how that valuation was arrived at but I think OJAp is worth a lot more. But then there is a difference between price and value…
The publisher in question this time was XLESCIENCE, which is based in India and which charges typical Article Processing Charges of $1,200 per paper. I wonder how they would plan to make a profit from OJAp, which charges nothing? If a publisher did buy OJAp and started trying to charge an APC, people would just stop using it!
(The offer price is not the only reason I dismissed the approach, however. One other reason is that I don’t want to do business with a commercial publisher. Another reason I wouldn’t consider selling the Open Journal of Astrophysics is that I don’t actually own it. I did think about offering to sell them one of the many other journals I don’t own, just for a laught, but that might have been construed as attempted fraud…)
This episode reminded that some time ago I wrote a piece about funding open access journals. Having made the decision not to charge fees of any kind, we lack any source of income other than Maynooth University. I am very grateful for that support, but we are run on a shoestring budget. We are run entirely by volunteers and keep costs to an absolute minimum, but are not free.
I have written before about what I think the future of Diamond Open Access could look like. I would like to see a range of Diamond Open Access journals offering a choice for authors and serving different sub-disciplines. Most universities nowadays have publishing operations so there could be network of federated journals, some based on arXiv and some based on other repositories and others with different models, such as SciPost. Perhaps institutions are worried about the expense but, as we have shown the actual cost, is far less than they are wasting on Article Processing Charges.
Everything is going well at OJAp, but it is not reasonable that the expense of running a journal that serves the global astrophysics community should fall entirely on one small University in Ireland. It won’t be sustainable in the long run, either, if we continue to grow at the present rate. Compare us with the Diamond Open Access publisher SCIPOST, which has a long list of sponsors covering its costs; we have none. I know that money is very tight in astrophysics these days but if you have access to any potential sources of funding – then please consider supporting OJAp!
In the Dark 
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