05/05/2021

Space and Grace in OA Publishing

Fees are often too high to provide open access

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Dustin Fife. Dustin is the Director of Library Services and Online Education at Western Colorado University.

I love Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER). I have helped faculty adopt OER for the last six years at two different universities; I have researched CC0 licenses from Creative Commons in relation to public libraries; I teach my classes using OER and I have served on the Colorado Department of Higher Education’s Open Education Council for the last several years helping write policy, plan conferences, distribute grant funds and create legislation. None of that makes me an expert per se, which many others in this community and throughout our profession are, but I do consider myself to be dedicated to the conversation and am well versed in some of the intricacies.

Recently, I experienced something that is not unique to me, and that, to some extent, is what makes it worth discussing. After finishing a research project and the first draft of a subsequent article, my co-authors and I decided that we preferred to submit our work to open outlets. We did some simple searches to find appropriate options and came up with a very short list of journals. While there are multiple open journals related to librarianship, they do not all cover the same topics or research areas. There was one journal of particular interest to us that was open and did not charge authors fees. We submitted our work and were asked to revise and resubmit. After resubmission, we were politely rejected.

Now, the purpose of this story is not to complain about being rejected. That process helped us considerably, and we made our article stronger because of it. However, when we returned to our list of open journals, the topical fit for our research with the titles remaining was tenuous at best. We were left with the choice of submitting our research to outlets that did not exactly fit, which seemed like a waste of time for everyone involved and not likely to lead to publication, or turning to a traditional subscription-based journal. We chose the latter option. The article was accepted for publication in a respected journal and, to be fair to the journal, we were given the option to publish our article open access. Unfortunately, however, the fee to do so was several thousands of dollars.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.