Research Article
Library Supported Open Access Funds: Criteria, Impact,
and Viability
Amanda B. Click
Business Librarian
Bender Library
American University
Washington, District of
Columbia, United States of America
Email: aclick@american.edu
Rachel Borchardt
Associate Director, Research
and Instructional Services
American University
Washington, District of
Columbia, United States of America
Email: borchard@american.edu
Received: 13 Aug. 2019 Accepted: 12 Oct. 2019
2019 Click and Borchardt. This is an Open
Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0
International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes,
and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or
similar license to this one.
DOI: 10.18438/eblip29623
Abstract
Objective – This study
analyzes scholarly publications supported by library open access funds,
including author demographics, journal trends, and article impact. It also
identifies and summarizes open access fund criteria and viability. The goal is
to better understand the sustainability of open access funds, as well as
identify potential best practices for institutions with open access funds.
Methods – Publication data
was solicited from universities with open access (OA) funds, and supplemented
with publication and author metrics, including Journal Impact Factor, Altmetric Attention Score, and author h-index.
Additionally, data was collected from OA fund websites, including fund criteria
and guidelines.
Results – Library OA funds
tend to support faculty in science and medical fields. Impact varied widely,
especially between disciplines, but a limited measurement indicated an overall
smaller relative impact of publications funded by library OA funds. Many open
access funds operate using similar criteria related to author and publication
eligibility, which seem to be largely successful at avoiding the funding of
articles published in predatory journals.
Conclusions – Libraries
have successfully funded many publications using criteria that could constitute
best practices in this area. However, institutions with OA funds may need to
identify opportunities to increase support for high-impact publications, as
well as consider the financial stability of these funds. Alternative models for
OA support are discussed in the context of an ever-changing open access
landscape.
Introduction
Libraries have been supporting open access (OA)
publishing for more than a decade, often by administering funds dedicated to
paying article processing charges (APCs). The literature provides some insight
into the design, implementation, and evaluation of library OA funds, but no
study has collected and analyzed the scholarship published using these funds.
This study involved building a dataset of almost 1,200 publications funded by
library OA funds collected from 16 universities. The authors compiled
descriptive statistics and conducted an analysis of the research impact of a
subset of the publications. In addition, the details and criteria of 55 active
library OA funds were collected in order to better contextualize impact and
identify trends in funding models.
The scholarly communications landscape is currently in a
state of flux. Plan S was rolled out in the fall of 2018, with the goal of
“making full and immediate open access a reality” (cOAlition
S, n.d.). The University of California system has made headlines by canceling
access to Elsevier after failing to agree on funding for OA publications (Kell,
2019). Librarians are exploring options and deciding how to best support OA
efforts, and this research will inform these efforts. Those considering the
implementation of a new fund, thinking about making changes to funding support
for OA, or designing marketing and outreach plans around OA may find the
results of this study to be useful.
Literature Review
In Knowledge
Unbound, Suber (2016) defines the APC in this
way:
A fee charged by some OA journals when accepting an
article for publication, in order to cover the costs of production. It’s one
way to cover production costs without charging readers and erecting access
barriers. While the invoice goes to the author, the fee is usually paid by the
author's funder or employer rather than by the author out of pocket. (p. 413).
University of California Berkeley librarians laid out
their argument for institutional open access funds as early as 2010 (Eckman
& Weil, 2010). That same year, however, an opinion piece in D-Lib Magazine argued against institutional funds for paying
gold OA APCs in favor of green OA self-archiving mandates (Harnad,
2010). Regardless, North American libraries have been providing OA funds to pay
APCs since 2008, according to SPARC’s (2018) Open Access Funds in Action report. Often these funds combine Gold
OA with Green OA by paying APCs but also requiring authors to deposit
manuscripts in the institutional repository.
The research on open access funds is sparse, and
generally focuses on surveying librarians about perspectives on OA, or
collecting feedback from fund recipients. There are also a number of case
studies describing the implementation of specific OA funds (Pinfield,
2010; Price, Engelson, Vance, Richardson, &
Henry, 2017; Sinn, Woodson, & Cyzyk, 2017; Zuniga
& Hoffecker, 2016), which will not be discussed
in this review of the literature. Similarly, while concerns about the rise of
so-called predatory publishing have been well documented, their implications
for open access funds have not been well researched (Berger, 2017).
An international survey of libraries published in 2015
showed that almost one quarter of the respondents offered OA funding to authors
provided by the institutional administration, library or academic departments
(Lara, 2015). Librarians surveyed about their libraries’ funds all used these
funds to promote OA on their campuses to some degree. Monson, Highby, and Rathe (2014) found that some were “ambitious
advocates” who hoped for “significant changes in campus culture,” while others
simply hoped to convince faculty to consider OA publishing a viable option (p.
317-318). A survey of faculty at large public universities that explored
opinions about and behaviors toward OA demonstrated that respondents had
varying expectations of library OA funding. Around 30% of total respondents
felt that the library should not be
expected to pay APCs, while half of the life sciences or medical faculty felt
that it was appropriate for the library to contribute from $500 to $4,000 for
APCs (Tenopir et al., 2017).
In 2015, librarians at Grand Valley State University
surveyed the 50 recipients who received funds to pay OA article processing
charges over the 4 years that the fund had been active. Most faculty indicated
that they chose to publish OA in order to increase the visibility of their
work. Many expressed support for the OA movement, and noted that they would not
have been able to pay the APC without the library OA fund (Beaubien, Garrison,
& Way, 2016). University of California Berkeley librarians also surveyed
the 138 recipients of APC funding from the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative
(BRII). Funding recipients felt that “that their articles received more
attention and had a greater impact that they might have had in a subscription
journal” (Teplitzky & Phillips, 2016).
Aims
This study was designed to explore the impact of the
literature supported by library OA funds, as well as summarize fund guidelines
and criteria. Our research questions include: What types of authors and
publications are libraries supporting with OA funds? What is the research
impact of these publications? How are library OA funds structured and
maintained? Answering these questions allowed us to consider of future
viability of OA funds in academia, as well as identify trends and potential
best practices for institutions looking to establish or evaluate an OA fund.
Methods
Using SPARC’s 2016 list of library OA funds, we contacted
63 college and university libraries to request data on funded OA publications
(Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition [SPARC], 2018). We
provided a spreadsheet template (see Appendix A for included fields) with
instructions to either send existing data or complete as much of the template
as possible. The 16 libraries listed in Table 1 responded. From these responses
we built a dataset of almost 1,200 articles, including data on discipline,
authorship, journal, publisher and DOI. We chose a subset of 453 articles – those
published in 2014 and 2016 – for additional impact analysis.
Table 1
List of Universities that Contributed Funded Article
Information to the Study Dataset
|
George Mason University |
University of Massachusetts Amherst |
|
Johns Hopkins University |
University of North Carolina at Greensboro |
|
University of California, Irvine |
University of Oklahoma |
|
University of California, San Francisco |
University of Pennsylvania |
|
University of California, Santa Barbara |
University of Pittsburgh |
|
University of California, Santa Clara |
University of Rhode Island |
|
University of Colorado Boulder |
Virginia Tech |
|
University of Iowa |
Wake Forest University |
In March 2019, we collected citation counts and Altmetric Attention Scores for each article published in
2014 and 2016 using the Dimensions database (Digital Science, n.d.-b). We also
collected Journal Impact Factors (JIF) from Journal Citation Reports and Scimago Journal Ranking (SJR) from ScimagoJR
for each journal, along with their inclusion status in the Directory of Open
Access Journals (DOAJ). Finally, we used Web of Science to identify the higher
h-index between the first and last author of each article for 450 of 453
publications. We were unable to find author information in Web of Science for
three articles.
To compare the relative impact of the articles in our
dataset to that of similar publications, we measured the average weighted
Relative Citation Ratio of all 2014/2016 PLOS publications in our dataset as
compared to all PLoS articles published in the middle
(late June/early July) of the same year (“Relative Citation Ratio,” 2017).
Fund Identification
and Criteria Analysis
The November 2018 version of the SPARC Open Access Funds
in Action sheet listed 64 current and former college and university OA funds
(Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition [SPARC], 2018). To
update this list, we searched Google for additional funds, using the search
statement “site:.edu ‘open access fund.’” We found an
additional 23 OA funds, for a total of 87 identified funds. Note that the SPARC
list is based on self-reported data, and thus its accuracy depends on
librarians knowing that it exists and also sending fund information annually.
Only 55 of the 87 funds appeared to be currently active - the remaining 32
funds had either indicated a cease in operations on their website or on the
SPARC list, or no longer maintained a discoverable website. In July 2019, we
collected information from these 55 websites regarding the funds and their
criteria, using Google to identify each individual fund website. We entered
information regarding each fund’s guidelines and criteria into a Google Form
(see Appendix B).
Findings
The average number of funded articles per OA fund per
year ranged from 3 to more than 46, with an average of 21 and median of 16
articles.
Nearly ¾ of funded applicants were classified as faculty.
Seven of the responding institutions tracked faculty status, and in those
institutions, 56% of funded articles were published by faculty classified as
“tenure,” including tenure-track faculty. Authors were predominantly affiliated
with either medicine/health, or science institutions or departments, with 69%
of articles in the dataset published in these combined categories. Similarly, ⅔
of the journals in which funded articles appeared were classified as science or
medicine. Articles were published in PLoS One more
than any other journal, representing 19% of total funded publications.
The dataset included payment data for 885 articles,
demonstrating that these 16 libraries had paid more than 1.2 million USD for
APCs between 2009 and 2018. Note that some of these funds had been in existence
for close to a decade, and some for just a couple of years. A few funding
programs had ended by the time we requested data on the supported publications.
For additional demographic information and descriptive
findings from the initial dataset, please refer to slides from a 2016
presentation (Click & Borchardt, 2017).
To better understand the impact of library funded OA
publications, we analyzed several metrics at the article, journal, and author
level for articles published in 2014 and 2016. Additionally, in order to better
contextualize some of these citation counts, we compared citation ratios from PLoS articles in our dataset with all PLoS
articles published mid-year in the same years.
Article citation counts varied widely, with a range from
0 to 194 for the combined 2014 and 2016 article dataset. The average citation
count was 8.9, while the median was five. The Altmetric
Attention Scores for our article subset ranged from 0 to 685. The average Score
was 15.8, and the median was 2. The Altmetric
Attention Score is “a weighted count of all of the mentions Altmetric
has tracked for an individual research output, and is designed as an indicator
of the amount and reach of the attention an item has received” (Williams,
2016). It includes mentions in policy documents, blogs, tweets, course syllabi,
Reddit and more (Digital Science, 2015). Figure 1 directly compares the
citation count and Altmetric Attention Score for all articles.
Figure
1
Comparison of
citation counts and Altmetric Attention Scores for
all articles in the 2014/2016 publication dataset.
Breaking down articles by journal subject category, we
found a range of average citation counts and Altmetric
Attention Scores for each discipline. The highest average citation count was
for articles published in engineering journals, at 11.66 average citations,
while articles in science journals had the highest average Altmetric
Attention Score with 20.01, as shown in Table 2.
Table 2
Disciplinary Breakdown of Average Citation Count and Altmetric Attention Scores in the 2014/2016 Publication
Dataset
|
|
Agriculture |
Engineering |
Humanities |
Medicine/ Health |
Sciences |
Social Sciences |
|
Average Citation
Count |
9.22 |
11.66 |
1.67 |
8.88 |
8.77 |
3.58 |
|
Average Altmetric Attention Score |
10.61 |
8.72 |
0.33 |
14.95 |
20.01 |
11.25 |
The majority of the articles (65%) in the 2014 and 2016
dataset were published in journals that had Journal Impact Factors (JIF),
ranging from .451 to 40.137, with an average JIF of 3.7 and median of 3.234.
For context, the mean 2016 JIFs for social science journals was 1.199,
engineering and technology 1.989, and clinical medicine 2.976, although a
direct comparison with our data is not appropriate as the subject categories are not necessarily defined in the same way (Larivière & Sugimoto, 2019). By contrast, 90% of
the articles in the subset were indexed by SCImago
and had Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) scores. The SJR
scores ranged from 0.106 to 18.389, with an average of 1.75 and median of
1.455. See Table 3 for average JIF and SJR by discipline. The range of JIFs and
SJRs for all articles are displayed in Figure 2.
Table 3
Disciplinary Breakdown of Average Journal Impact Factor
(JIF) and Scimago Journal Rankings (SJR) for Journals
in the 2014/2016 Publication Dataset
|
Academic Discipline |
Average JIF |
Average SJR |
|
Agriculture |
3.129 |
1.509 |
|
Engineering |
3.101 |
1.323 |
|
Humanities |
2.441 |
1.013 |
|
Medicine/Health |
3.761 |
1.675 |
|
Science |
4.002 |
2.061 |
|
Social Science |
2.933 |
1.036 |
Figure 2
Comparison of Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and SCImago Journal Rankings (SJR) for journals in the
2014/2016 publication dataset.
Author-level
Metrics
H-indices were found for all but three publications in
the 2014 and 2016 dataset. The h-index is an “author-level metric calculated
from the count of citations to an author’s set of publications” (“H-index,”
2017). If an author’s h-index is seven, this means that the author has
published at least seven articles and each of them have been cited at least
seven times. In this study, we looked up the h-index for the first and last
author of each paper in the subset of articles, and used the higher numbers. We
looked at both because in some disciplines the lead author is first and in
others last. H-indices ranged from 0 to 108, with an average of 25.3 and median
of 22.
Of the 87 funds identified, only 55 (63%) were active as
of July 2019. We collected and summarized fund guidelines and evaluative
criteria related to author eligibility, publication eligibility, and funding
details.
Nearly all of the funds analyzed listed faculty as
eligible fund recipients, with the majority (50 out of 55) listing all faculty,
with another four specifying tenure-track or
non-tenured faculty. Graduate students were the next most common group, listed
by 48 of the 55 funds (including 1 fund specifically for graduate students),
followed by staff and post-docs. Undergraduate students and researchers were
also listed at lower rates, with a few other groups, such as emeriti and
fellows, selectively mentioned. Several libraries give priority to graduate
students, early career faculty, and applicants who have not previously received
OA funding. Some require that the corresponding or lead author apply for funding.
In total, 36% of funds had some form of policy dealing
with multiple authors. Often, these policies indicated that the level of
funding would be prorated by the number of authors, and funding would only be
given proportionately to the percentage of authors associated with the
institution.
Most of the funds also specified that the funds only be
used when the author had exhausted other sources of funding, though this criteria was variously worded. While most stipulated
that library funds be considered “last resort,” some specifically excluded
researchers with grant funds, such as those with an NIH grant.
38% of the funds either requested or mandated that a
version of the article be placed in the institution’s repository. The wording
often indicated that this step was automated, usually by the library, as part
of the funding process.
Every one of the funds covered journal articles, though
their journal inclusion criteria differed as discussed below. It was found that
15explicitly cover monographs, 12 cover book chapters, 4 cover conference
proceedings, and 3 cover datasets. However, in the vast majority of cases these
other publication types are not specifically excluded - but neither are they
mentioned - leaving their final eligibility unknown (or perhaps simply
untested).
Every fund listed criteria the publication must meet in
order to be eligible for funding, though in many cases, several criteria were
used in conjunction to determine eligibility. The most common criterion
mentioned was inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ),
followed by Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) membership or
compliance with OASPA membership criteria. See Figure 3 for the most common
publication criteria. Although we did not track this specifically, we noticed
that many funds require authors to include an acknowledgement statement with
their articles, such as “Publication of this article was funded by the ABC
University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund.”
Figure 3
Most commonly-mentioned journal, article, and author
criteria present on OA fund websites.
Hybrid publications, or journals which require a
subscription but make individual articles open access for an additional fee,
were excluded by 50 of the 55 funds. Of the remaining five, two explicitly
allowed for hybrid publication funding, one evaluated hybrid journals on a
case-by-case basis, and two were unknown based on the listed criteria. One fund
that allows hybrid publications offers a higher pay rate for fully OA versus
hybrid. In a previous survey with a smaller sample, 6 out of 10 libraries
declined to provide OA funds for hybrid publications (Monson et al.,
2014).
For 43 out of 55 funds, a definitive source or sources of
funding were identified. Of those, 93% indicated that funding came from the
library, while 14% listed the Provost’s office. Also listed were Offices of
Research, Vice Provost or Vice Chancellor’s offices, individual schools or
colleges, Office of Academic Affairs, faculty senate, and an emeriti
association. A small survey of 10 universities published in 2014 also found the
Provost's Office and the Office of Research to be common funding partners for
OA funds (Monson et al., 2014).
Most of the library funds (87%) have a maximum
reimbursement per article, ranging from 750 CDN (570 USD as of 5 August 2019)
to 4,000 USD. The most common reimbursement maximums are 1,500 USD and 3,000
USD (see Figure 4 for more detail). The few funds that specifically address
monographs commonly have a 5000 USD limit, although one offered 7,500 USD. In
addition, ⅔ of the funds have a maximum reimbursement per author per year, most
commonly 3,000 USD. Interestingly, two funds require that authors first request
a waiver or reduction of publishing charges prior to applying for library OA
funds.
Figure 4
Distribution of maximum reimbursement per article amounts present in OA
fund criteria.
Discussion
We observed that science and medicine largely dominated
both the overall funded publication output as well as impact metrics, which is
generally consistent with disciplinary trends in higher education (Clarivate
Analytics, n.d.; Digital Science, n.d.-a).
Looking at the impact metrics, both the range of citation
counts and h-indexes were broader than we had anticipated. Clearly, some
high-impact research is being funded with library OA funds, despite two common
fund restrictions that could limit impact: The “last resort” requirement makes
it less likely that a grant-funded project would be funded (on the assumption
that grant-funded projects have a higher likelihood of being high-impact
research), and the near-universal limit of hybrid publication funding mostly
eliminates the ability to fund articles for publication in many of the
highest-impact subscription model journals. These high-impact publications
confirm that faculty’s self-reported interest in OA publishing to increase
their visibility discussed earlier is legitimate, and can result in not only a
high citation count but also in a high Altmetric
Attention Score (Beaubien et al., 2016; Teplitzky
& Phillips, 2016).
However, the RCR comparisons for the PLoS
articles indicate that, based on the limited comparison, these funded articles
have a slightly lower impact based on their citation counts as compared to
similarly published research outside the dataset. This could be due to the two
limiting criteria for funds described above. Regardless, it represents an
opportunity for libraries with OA funds to increase outreach efforts to
researchers and labs considered to be high-impact at their institution. While
we see some mixed results from overall relative impact and attention of this
dataset, messaging around visibility remains a viable selling point to faculty
considering OA publication, with plenty of examples of high-visibility work
being funded.
Effectiveness of OA
Fund Criteria
In a 2015 study, only ⅓ of the libraries that provide OA
funding indicated that they had evaluative criteria in place for funding
requests. Some respondents noted that funded articles must be published in
fully OA journals and hybrid journals do not qualify, with 35% requiring listing
in the DOAJ. This study found that 27% of the libraries simply provided funding
on faculty request (Lara, 2015). Our study observed a much higher rate of
evaluative criteria, with virtually every OA fund listing guidelines and
requirements on their websites, indicating a large trend toward the development
of criteria in the past several years.
We were interested to explore the effectiveness of these
criteria, and did so by checking the journals in our sample for predatory
publishers. Predatory publishers – sometimes called deceptive publishers –
charge publication fees but make false claims about their publication
practices. These publishers, which tend to be OA, may accept and publish
articles with little to no peer review or editing, falsely list scholars as
editorial board members, and/or fail to be transparent regarding APCs.
Identifying predatory publishers can be a challenge. Jeffrey Beall ran a
popular website tracking predatory publishers, which was deactivated in 2017 (Basken, 2017). Currently, Cabell’s provides a blacklist of
deceptive and predatory journals, using a list of criteria that are categorized
as severe (e.g., the journal gives a fake ISSN, the journal includes scholars
on an editorial board without their knowledge or permission), moderate (e.g.,
the journal’s website does not have a clearly stated peer review policy), and
minor (e.g., the publisher or its journals are not listed in standard
periodical directories or are not widely catalogued in library databases) (Toutloff, 2019). We used a different tool, however, to
evaluate journals in our sample.
We identified 20 journals in our 2014/2016 sample that
were not indexed by ScimagoJR. We used a list of
questions from Think. Check. Submit to evaluate those 20 journals (e.g., Is the
journal clear about the type of peer review it uses?) and found 4 did not
“pass” this checklist (Think. Check. Submit., n.d.). However, we could not
determine whether these four journals were predatory, or simply struggling
publications with unclear or incomplete information on their websites. For
example, one of the four journals is a Sage
publication, but does not provide APC information or discuss adherence to or
compliance with any open access initiatives such as COPE, OASPA, or DOAJ. The
lack of clarity for these four journals mirrors Jain and Singh’s (2019)
findings that predatory publishers are ‘evolving’ with criteria checklists,
making these kinds of evaluations more difficult, though they base their
findings on Beall’s criteria rather than Think. Check. Submit.
A 2017 commentary in Nature
Human Behavior discussing stakeholders affected by predatory journals
suggests explicit exclusion of predatory journals in OA fund criteria as one
mechanism for deterring researchers from predatory publication (Lalu, Shamseer, Cobey, & Moher, 2017). Two older papers that surveyed
librarians also mentioned using Beall’s List in OA fund criteria to identify
predatory or low quality journals (Lara, 2015; Monson et al., 2014). However, 2
of the 55 OA funds we examined still mentioned Beall’s list - a sign that
libraries have not entirely kept current with OA journal evaluation practices
(or, at the very least, that their websites are no longer accurate reflections
of current practice). Librarians and other OA funders must continue to monitor
evolving practices for evaluation of predatory publications, such as Cabell’s
and Think. Check. Submit, in order to maintain the effectiveness of OA fund
criteria.
37%t of the OA funds that we identified via our data
collection, SPARC’s OA Funds in Action list, and Google searching are no longer
active as of summer 2019. Given the relatively short time that OA funds have
been in existence, this rate of default points to a potentially troubling
viability for OA funds. Whether OA funds will continue to be funded may largely
depend on other concurrent OA and library initiatives, such as big deal
cancellations and Plan S compliance, which could help determine the future OA
landscape and more sustainable funding models.
Funding sources could also play a critical role in the
future viability of these funds. In a 2015 survey of libraries that provide OA
funding, 70% stated that OA funds came from the existing materials budget, and
24% indicated that they came from a new budget allotment unrelated to materials
(Lara, 2015). We posit that, in the age of uncertain library budgets for many
libraries, identification of non-library campus partners may be critical for
the long-term continuation of these funds. Examples of distributed funding includeIUPUI’s fund, which lists no less than 13 campus
partners contributing to the fund;and Wake Forest,
which cost-shares publication fees equally between the library, Office of
Research and Sponsored Programs, and the author’s department (IUPUI University
Library, n.d.; Wake Forest University Library, n.d.).
We observed several cost-saving measures employed by OA
funds, including maximum article and author fees, as well as article funding at
less than 100%, all of which may also help contribute to the sustainability of
these funds. In the 2015 survey, “about 80% of respondents were unsure or
stated that there is no established maximum, 19% stated that there is a maximum
fee in place. Nearly all of the respondents whose institutions have an
established ceiling for funding placed the maximum price in the range of
$2,000–3,000” (Lara, 2015, p. 7). This shift from 19% in 2015 to the 87% of
funds in 2019 with price capping suggests that future viability may be
dependent on limiting these funds, at least for now. One of the more innovative
approaches to price capping we observed was University of Massachusetts
Amherst’s OA fund, which started at 50% fee coverage, with increased coverage
earned through additional criteria, such as early-career authors, first-time
applicants, a non-profit or society publisher, and having an ORCID (UMass
Amherst Libraries, n.d.).
We see an opportunity to further investigate OA funds in
order to establish more concrete best practices. We have seen shifts in
criteria models used by funds - but have these shifts contributed to the
success or failure of individual funds? Are funds with more distributed funding
models more sustainable? Our findings hint at these possibilities, but more
research would help clarify these potential best practices. We also see value
in continuing to monitor institutional funding for OA as the scholarly
communications landscape continues to change. Many possibilities for OA rely on
financial support from libraries, and a coordinated approach toward funding
models may be the key to the success or failure of broad OA adoption.
Alternative OA support models are already emerging. For
example, Reinsfelder and Pike (2018) urge a shift
away from libraries spending funds on APCs and towards crowdfunded models like
Knowledge Unlatched, SCOAP3, and Unglue.it. They argue that $25,000
would pay approximately 12.5 journal APCs, but would fund 471 new OA books through
a Knowledge Unlatched pledge. Likewise, Berger (2017) argues that advocacy by
libraries for different funding models de-commodifies scholarship, and will
also “mortally wound” predatory publishers’ viability. Some universities in the
U.S. are starting to make this shift. In 2019, the University of Arizona
Libraries transitioned away from their Open Access Publishing Fund,
establishing an Open Access Investment Fund. Instead of paying individual APCs
for OA publications, the Libraries will now pay for institutional memberships
with specific publishers that include APC discounts, as well as initiatives
with “wide potential global impact” like arXiv and
the Open Textbook Network (University of Arizona University Libraries, 2019).
Conclusion
Libraries in North America are clearly dedicated to
supporting the OA movement, and in recent years this has meant providing
authors with funds to pay APCs. This study explores the articles published via
library OA funds at 16 universities and their impact, as well as the guidelines
and criteria set forth in 55 funds. Findings indicate that research impact is a
useful tool for increasing faculty support of OA and that existing fund
criteria have been refined over recent years to encourage publication in mostly
high-quality journals. OA funds have supported researchers in a wide range of
disciplines and career stages, with STEM fields and researchers being the most
frequently-supported by these funds. However, there is some evidence to suggest
that these funds may not be supporting the highest impact research, possibly as
a result of fund criteria restrictions. The overall OA landscape is shifting,
and the APC model may not prove to be viable. Price capping of funds and
distributed funding models may increase the sustainability of these funds in
the future. Regardless of the administrative details behind funding, the ways
that institutions choose to financially support OA will continue to evolve as
the OA movement develops.
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Appendix
A
Library Fund Data Collection Fields
|
Institutional
Details |
Publication
Details |
|
Journal
Title |
|
|
Private
or Public |
Indexed
in DOAJ (Y/N) |
|
Carnegie
Classification (e.g., R2) |
Hybrid
(Y/N) |
|
Author
Details |
Journal
Impact Factor |
|
Discipline |
Journal
Publisher |
|
Author
Name |
Article
Details |
|
Co-Authors
(Y/N) |
Article
Title |
|
International
Collaborators (Y/N) |
Reimbursement
Amount |
|
Status
(e.g., faculty, grad student) |
Reimbursement
Year |
|
Tenure
(Y/N) |
Publication
Year |
|
Email |
doi |
|
H-index |
|
Appendix B
OA Fund Criteria Data Collection Form
- Name of
University: ______________________________________
- Who is
eligible for these funds? (check all that apply)
- Faculty (all)
- Faculty
(tenure track specified)
- Staff
- Undergraduate
students
- Graduate
students
- Postdocs
- Researchers
- Other:
________________________________
- What types of
publications are eligible? (check all that apply)
- Journal
articles
- Book chapters
- Monographs
- Other: ________________________________
- Which criteria
must the publication meet? (check all that apply)
- Peer reviewed
- Listed in
DOAJ
- Listed in
DOAB
- OASPA member
or compliant
- Immediate
open access
- Published fee
schedule
- Policy for
economic hardship
- NOT on Beall’s
list
- No predatory
publishers
- Agree to put
in repository
- OA fund is
last resort
- APC only
(e.g., no submission fees)
- Other:
________________________________
- Hybrid
allowed?
- Yes
- No
- Case-by-case
- Other:
________________________________
- Is there a
maximum reimbursement per article?
- Yes
- No
- What is the
maximum reimbursement per article? _____________________
- Is there a
maximum reimbursement per author per year?
- Yes
- No
- What is the
maximum reimbursement per author per year? ______________________
- Limited to 1
publication per author per year?
- Yes
- No
- Multiple
author policy?
- Yes
- No
- Source of
funds? (check all that apply)
- Provost’s
Office
- Library
- Other:
________________________________
- Notes:
______________________________________