Open Access Week

At around $2,500, a typical OA article processing fee (APC) is simply unaffordable for scholars without substantial grant funding, and thus for many in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Still, there are OA publishing options with zero fees for authors in all fields. Today’s post highlights cooperatively funded open access journal article publishing options for humanities and social sciences researchers at Mason. For fields with an emphasis on book publishing, we will explore the remarkable rise of OA monographs later this week. 

Library-funded OA publishing with Cambridge University Press and Wiley journals 

In January 2023, a new OA agreement with Cambridge University Press journals dramatically expanded OA publishing options for humanities and social sciences researchers throughout Virginia. This agreement funds OA publishing in almost all Cambridge journals. By September, nine Mason authors had opted to publish OA under this agreement, in fields including history, linguistics, psychology, and economics.  

The longest running of VIVA’s OA agreements, with Wiley, also provides APC funding for leading journals in humanities and social sciences disciplines. Journals in Wiley’s portfolio include History & Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, and Nous, to name a few. 

To take advantage of these OA publishing opportunities, be sure to list a Mason (or other VIVA institution) researcher as corresponding author, using an official Mason email address. For accepted manuscripts, the author publishing agreement will include the option to use our institutional agreement to cover the OA fee. All articles go through the standard double-anonymous peer review process, with OA options offered only after acceptance. 

Beyond APCs: Subscribe to Open (S2O) 

The VIVA agreements represent one way of using collective action to overcome this challenge: state institutions negotiate together to achieve more favorable terms from publishers, and libraries assume responsibility for covering publishing fees. The path forward for these agreements, however, remains unclear: will these agreements inflate in cost like traditional journal subscription packages? Can APC costs be contained? And how can these agreements support OA publishing for scholars outside large, well-funded libraries and consortia? 

Leading actors in humanities and social sciences publishing, including Project Muse, are exploring a promising alternative to APC-based OA agreements called Subscribe to Open, or S2O. Under this approach, a publisher invites libraries to convert their subscription fee into an annual contribution to OA publishing costs. A traditional subscription provides access to paywalled articles for the subscribing institution’s readers only. Subscribe to Open, by contrast, takes the same library contribution and uses it to make journal contents available not only to that institution's affiliates, but to all, at no cost to readers or authors. Through VIVA, Mason currently participates in an S2O converting the entire Annual Reviews portfolio to OA. 

The University Libraries are actively redirecting dedicated OA funds towards sustainable, equitable, collective action approaches to OA, so that scholars from all disciplines, all institution types, and all regions of the world can read and publish without facing prohibitive fees. Learn more about OA publishing, with or without author fees, here, or reach out to Emilie Algenio, Open Educational Resources and Scholarly Communications Librarian, at ealgenio@gmu.edu.