Yesterday I was going through the “onboarding” process via Zoom with two new Editors at the Open Journal of Astrophysics (OJAp) when one of them mentioned a recent policy decision at the USA which means we’ll probably get even more papers submitted from there. I wasn’t aware of the decision, but there’s an article in the Times Higher about it here.
In a nutshell:
Under proposed rule changes published by the Office of Management and Budget, all journal publication costs – “including page charges, article processing charges (APCs), or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications” – will become “unallowable under federal awards”.
It is important to stress that at this stage the change is proposed rather than actual and it remains to be seen whether it will stand. I think it should because publication fees, article processing charges or whatever you call them are a complete waste of money.
The Times Higher article frames this as “Trump’s ban on paying open access fees”. I was worried to be finding myself in agreement with Donald Trump on anything, but I very much doubt that Trump himself knows anything about scientific publishing or has had much of a hand in this decision. It seems to me to be eminently sensible to ensure that funds meant to be directed at research are not frittered away on page charges. If I were involved in running a research institution I would make it a disciplinary offence to spend money on publication fees.
Of course the academic publishing industry is upset about the proposal claiming that scientific publishing is “high cost”, which it is but only because the publishers rake in huge profits. The way forward, as I have argued many times (e.g. here), is Diamond Open Access, a exemplified by OJAp. The marginal cost per paper article published for OJAp is just $10 and we have at least as much impact as the other leading journals in astrophysics.
I have been surprised how many researchers from the USA are already using OJAp, including many from top institutions such as Harvard, Caltech, Princeton and Chicago. The surprise is basically that authors from the USA have for many years been used to paying page charges for publishing in the Astrophysical Journal and others from the AAS stable. This was the case even before digital journals came on the scene and well before the Open Access movement. I suppose American authors put up with page charges because they felt they had to, but that is no longer the case.
Will we get even more submissions from the USA as a result of this policy change? We’ll just have to wait and see…
P.S. This morning I published the 600th paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
In the Dark 