The American Physical Society (APS) is pleased to announce that it will soon expand its Open Access (OA) offerings to articles published in Physical Review A-E, Physical Review Letters, and Reviews of Modern Physics. This OA initiative is called FREE TO READ and, when released in early September 2006, can be applied to any article or group of articles published in the Journals of the American Physical Society back to 1893. Anyone (authors, readers, institutions, funding agencies, etc.) may, by paying a one-time fee, make articles published in our journals available on our sites to all readers at no cost and without a subscription. Readers will have access to PDF and postscript versions of the FREE TO READ articles through the APS online journals.
For years APS has been a leader in OA with its early and continued support of arXiv.org and with its exemplary copyright agreement form. The agreement allows authors to make available their APS publications on their own or their institution’s website. APS introduced its first OA journal, Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams, in 1998. Based on a sponsorship model, this journal has steadily grown over the past 8 years and is now supported by an international group of accelerator laboratories. APS introduced a second OA journal in 2005 called Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research. This freely available journal is financed by publication charges to the authors or the authors’ institutions. The introduction of FREE TO READ extends OA to the articles for all of APS’ journals.
The FREE TO READ fees will initially be $975 for articles in Physical Review A-E and $1300 for Letters in PRL. Articles in RMP, due to their large size and the limited number published annually, will be considered on a case-by-case basis. The higher price associated with PRL is due to its higher cost per published Letter (because of its stringent acceptance rate).
The fees will initially augment revenues for the APS, since they will not be replacing subscriptions, but have been set well below the current amount per article needed to recover costs in the absence of subscriptions. The fees will therefore be adjusted as necessary to maintain APS’ ability to sustain this initiative. Additional revenues from FREE TO READ will primarily be used to lower the current subscription rates of the smallest (lowest tier) institutions.
The FREE TO READ initiative represents a path by which APS could gradually transition to full Open Access. If the community (especially institutions and funding agencies) shows continued support for this initiative, a sustainable level may be reached in which the APS can recover its costs, offset its risks, and eliminate subscriptions for some or all of its journals.
The APS is determined to extend every effort to make this model successful. Martin Blume, the Editor-in-Chief, states that "APS is a financially stable organization willing to take risks to support the community," and it is with the community in mind that APS is offering FREE TO READ. For additional information, please go to the FREE TO READ FAQ.
This is the first hybrid program to apply retroactively. The good news is that toll access (TA) articles from the back run can now be liberated by anyone willing to pay the ransom. The bad news is that APS has already received subscription payments for those articles and presumably amortized its investment in them. It's adding a second charge when it might have opened access to the back run without charging another fee. --But then again the good news is that APS hopes the new program will allow it to reduce subscription prices going forward and even eliminate them in favor of pure OA.
It appears that the program applies prospectively as well, and not just retroactively (though I'd welcome clarification about that). If true, the prospective part of the program leaves some questions unanswered: Will APS let participating authors retain copyright? Will it waive its fee in cases of economic hardship? Will it still allow immediate self-archiving for authors who choose not to pay the fee?
Update. I just got answers to some of my questions from Bob Kelly, Director of Journal Information Systems at APS. Yes, the program applies prospectively as well as retroactively. No, authors may not retain copyright. And yes, non-participating authors may still self-archive without an embargo or fee. (Thanks, Bob.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/16/2006 03:55:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
