** with apologies for cross-posting **
Who benefits from the University of Calgary authors' fund? This was
a useful question raised at a talk this week by Andrew Waller, at the
University of British Columbia.
In my opinion, there are two main groups of beneficiaries:
U of C faculty and students
University of Calgary faculty and senior students who wish to publish
in OA journals that charge article processing fees and have no funds
available. Not that every request will be approved; but at least,
there is a place to make a request with some hope of getting funding.
Everyone involved in scholarly communication.
Even at this early date, the investigative work done by U of C has
resulted in procedures that identify that it makes sense to fund
fully open access journals, such as Public Library of Science,
BioMedCentral, and Hindawi, as well as hybrid options of publishers
that reduce subscription rates for libraries on the basis of revenue
from open access fees - like Oxford. This is a great model for other
libraries; if other libraries follow this example, in my opinion the
odds that publishers will plan to decrease subscription fees on the
basis of OA revenue will quickly and significantly increase.
PLEASE NOTE: the majority of open access journals do NOT charge
article processing fees, and it is not necessary to publish in an
open access journal to make your work OA. The green road, publishing
in a traditional journal and self-archiving for open access, is
another avenue and one that U of C recommends as appropriate as an
alternative to the authors' fund.
A more detailed version of this message is available on The Imaginary
Journal of Poetic Economics, at:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2008/11/who-benefits-from-
university-of-calgary.html
Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, and
does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic Library
Network or Simon Fraser University Library.
Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Received on Thu Nov 20 2008 - 09:39:55 GMT