Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, June 08, 2006

One way to support no-fee OA journals

Heather Morrison, Open Access: the Membership Fee Subsidy Model, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, June 7, 2006. Excerpt:
The majority of open access journals do not charge processing fees. Such journals operate on a variety of models and combinations of approaches. This blogpost looks at the simple membership-fee-subsidy model. For a very large society, a small subsidy from membership fees could create a very substantial pool of money for open access publishing. For example, if the world's largest scientific society, the American Chemical Society, were to set aside $10 from the fees of each of its 158,000 members, this would create an annual fund of $1.5 million to subsidize open access publishing. For an organization of this size, it is not out of the question to find such money by shifting internal priorities, without raising membership fees by so much as a penny.