Information Research Weblog

Thanks to Peter Suber's OA News for this item:

The German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG) has announced a funding program to launch new science journals, expand existing journals, and help print journals make the transition to electronic publication. To be eligible for funding, the journals must meet the DFG guidelines for open access, peer review, and preservation. (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.)

The enlightened character of this development compares favourably with the still unresolved policy of the UK Research Councils, which seem continually to be running scared of actually making a decision - the latest information that I could find on the Website was that discussion of its report on the subject was an agenda item for a meeting of the Executive Group held on the 25 April 2007. What the outcome was appears not to be recorded. However, we know from the earlier publications on the subject that the RCUK considers that there are only two forms of open access, "author pays" and "self-archiving". The notion that research funds, instead of supporting commercial publishers through "author payments", could go to the formation of new, collaborative, no fee, no subscription e-journals, is not on their agenda. The real reason for this, of course, is that the Research Councils fear offending government policy towards business - even if those businesses lie mainly outside the UK. The evidence for this is in the UKRC's own document. The intention is announced to:

Initiate a project to investigate the impact of author-pays publication and self-archiving on research publishing. Three leading publishers (Macmillan, Blackwell and Elsevier) have indicated that they are prepared to be involved in the project.

Obviously the companies want to be involved to protect their interests and I can't envisage anything happening to seriously affect the status quo.

The issue of funding OA publishing is the subject of another pair of items in Peter's newsletter: one on the University of Wisconsin setting aside resources to pay for OA - including support for free journals; and the other points to Heather Morrison's Weblog, where, in an article on the use of National Institutes of Health research funds, she notes:

If half the articles were paid for through article processing fees, about 32,500 articles, the $30 million NIH is already paying for publication charges would cover an average of $923 per article. That this is well within the realm of feasibility is illustrated by the fact that, while $923 average is less than the fee charged by some open access publishers, but it is more than is charged by other open access publishers, including the profitable Hindawi.
The feasibility of full open access publishing for NIH-funded research becomes even more obvious when we consider the possibility of redeploying some or all of the "indirect costs", from subscriptions or site licenses to support for open access initiatives.