Reasons not to pay APCs at hybrid journals.

See Richard Van Noorden, "Wellcome and Gates join bold European open-access plan," Nature News, November 5, 2018.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07300-5

For his article, Richard asked me to comment on the refusal to pay APCs at hybrid journals. I was glad to do so. I knew that he couldn't use my full comment, but wrote it out at some length anyway, knowing that I could post it here for those who might be interested.

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I applaud the Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation for deciding to stop paying APCs at hybrid journals. This would be a good move even if Plan S were not on the horizon.

For example, Harvard decided about a decade ago, long before Plan S, not to use its APC fund to pay fees at hybrid journals.

One reason to adopt this rule is to make limited APC funds go further. The more important reason is to create good incentives for journals receiving the money. Paying fees at hybrid journals essentially pays them to stay hybrid. If we pay them at all, then we should want our payments to work as incentives to convert to full or non-hybrid OA.

No single institution can do much to make this incentive strong. But the more institutions that adopt this rule, the stronger the incentive becomes.

Another cluster of reasons for this rule arises from the case for full OA journals over hybrid journals. For example, hybrid journals charge subscriptions, limiting the ability of libraries to use their funds to support OA. Hybrid journals charge higher average APCs than full OA journals. And hybrid journals can double-dip (charge twice for the same article, once from the subscription and once from the APC), and usually do, while full-OA journals cannot double-dip.

I could support paying APCs at the subset of hybrid journals willing to (1) convert to full OA on a certain timetable, (2) face certain consequences if they didn't, such as reduced subscription prices to fee-paying institutions for a stipulated period, and (3) put that commitment in to the site license agreement.

I applaud the Wellcome and Gates decisions even though I want all APC-paying organizations to acknowledge the existence, preponderance, and value of no-fee or no-APC OA journals, and to find ways to support them as well. Of course these are compatible. I only bring this up because the more we debate the fine-points of APC policies, the more we tend to forget that only a minority of peer-reviewed OA journals even charge APCs.

#oa #openaccess #wellcome_trust #gates_foundation #apcs #hybrid_journals
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