Financing Open Access Publishing

In response to the “Dear Colleague” letter of January 13 requesting feedback on the current NSF Strategic Plan 2018 - 2022, the PsySiP Board of Directors has suggested that the updated plan address:

·      Financing models for Open Access publishing in scholarly and scientific literature

Open Access Journals can be found on platforms of scholarly societies, research organizations, and other sources (see, for example, https://doaj.org/). Purely Open Access journals “remain the exception in psychology” according to the Open Access Project at Bielefeld University, GDR (2020). However, the Open Access movement is well underway in that field. 

Publishing costs for Open Access publishing vary. Nonetheless, we offer this pricing example from the Elsevier website:

• The publishing costs are covered by the author or by their institution/funding body/society on their behalf, typically in the form of an Article Publishing Charge (APC) or other types of fees. Authors can check with their institution whether funding for their APCs is available.

Given the expansion of multi-disciplinary/collaborative research, preparation of research findings for publication may extend beyond the expiration of a grant and result in authors lacking funds to pay Open Access publishing costs. For scientific societies whose financial situation has been challenged during the COVID-19 era due to cancelled meetings/stagnant membership, we believe it is unrealistic to expect that these professional groups can continue to shoulder the publication costs of all authors who seek support (estimated by Elsevier, for example, to be between $150 and $6,000 per article)

We urge NSF to address Open Access publishing costs across the sciences in a revised Strategic Plan to include a review of business models as well as NSF guidelines supporting grantee publication in Open Access journals.