Submission fees, a viable option for OA journals?

Knowledge Exchange has just released a report bearing the title ‘Submission fees – A tool in the transition to Open Access?. The general conclusion is that there are benefits to publishers in certain cases to switch to a model in which an author pays a fee when submitting an article. Especially journals with a high rejection rate might be interested in combining submission fees with article processing charges in order to make the transition to open access easier. In certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the experi¬men¬tal life sciences, submission fees are already common.

The report has also sparked a discussion for example on the Scholarly Kitchen blog on whether this might be a viable option for OA journals in the future.

Open Access week: activities in the Netherlands

19-23 October is the international Open Access week. There will be a lot of activities in the Netherlands to promote Open Access. You can find a (hopefully quite comprehensive) list here.

Open and Shut?: Open Access: Whom would you back?

A very interesting blogposting and article by Richard Poynder. For all those out there trying to get an overview of the current state of affairs regarding Open Access: Green vs. Gold Road, Article Processing Charges vs. Institution Fee replacing the 'Big Deals'. It takes the discussion one step further than the first argument for Open Access: Accessibility. OA can also be used as a means to change the dependancy of Universities on publishers: Affordability. In the subscription model the library pays the institutional fees and the researchers are kept away from the pricing. At present a researcher simply chooses a journal by topic and of course citation index. Journal pricing does not play a role in selecting a journal to publish in. Simply changing the model to Open Access with an instution fee will consolidate this situation.

Open and Shut?: Open Access: Whom would you back?

HBO Kennisbank Widget

Just a quick snippet out of my new job: The HBO (Universities of Applied Sciences) in the Netherlands are now also adopting repositories. Interestingly they were later than the research universities who each built their own repository. A number of HBOs have chosen to make use of a central repository service offered by SURF. This is called the HBO kennisbank. It is a big success, especially in collecting and offering Student theses.
You can access the HBO knowledge bank at: http://www.hbokennisbank.nl but you can also add the widget below to your blog/portal/website.