Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, August 28, 2008

A fee-based OA journal explains its fees

Claire Bird, Keith Fox, and Rich Roberts, Publication Charges, Nucleic Acids Research, August 12, 2008.  An editorial.  NAR is the first full OA (not hybrid OA) journal from Oxford University Press.  Excerpt:

NAR's full open access initiative is now in its fourth year. There is no question that during this period the greatest challenge has been to set author charges that are within the reach of authors’ hard-won funding, yet financially sustainable for the journal. This is a continued topic of discussion for NAR's editors and publishers....

NAR does not apply additional submission fees, page charges for up to nine pages, colour or supplementary data charges, or charges for depositing in NIH or supplying a PDF version of the published article to authors. A recent review of other journals in this field suggests that the total costs of publishing may not always be dissimilar to publishing in NAR....

The open access element of NAR's publication charge is mandatory, the choice we made when we adopted this alternative business model in 2005. In turn, authors can decide whether publishing in NAR warrants any additional costs, but it is certainly worth considering that page and colour charges alone in other journals may often reach the USD 1000–1500 range.

It is also important to note that authors are entitled to a 50% discount on the NAR open access charge if they are based at a member institution or have paid the full charge for another NAR paper in the last 12 months....

Fair and fast peer review of your paper, with first decision times averaging 26 days. Rapid online publication of the final version within 4 weeks of acceptance on average, and we continue to look for ways to make this process faster. Immediate open access to all online users. The NAR site attracts over 380 000 full-text downloads per month, with a further 260 000 downloads per month via PubMed Central. Automatic deposit of the final version of your article in PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central, assuring easy compliance with the policies of funders including HHMI, NIH, UK MRC and the Wellcome Trust....