‘Library funding for open access at KU Leuven’

KU Leuven's Demmy Verbeke and Laura Mesotten, writing in UKSG Insights on their APC-free Fund for Fair Open Access: We should consider why we strive for OA. If it is only to arrange broader access to the published record, then the easiest approach undoubtedly is to...

The Big APC Question Mark Hovering Over the OSTP Announcement

From yesterday's blockbuster White House announcement on immediate OA for federally funded research: Improving public access policies across the U.S. government to promote the rapid sharing of federally funded research data with appropriate protections and...

Turning the Tables on Mirror Journals

Audrey Smith and co-authors, in a study published in MIT's Quantitative Science Studies late last year, with still more evidence that APCs exclude authors from the Global South: We found that for the overwhelming majority of articles published in the Mirror-Parent...

The APC Dam Is Breaking

The article processing charge (APC)—and its stealthy cousin, the read-and-publish deal—are finally coming under the ferocious assault that they deserve. This last year, both the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation and the Budapest Open Access Initiative came out strong...

The BPC Penalty

COPIM's Judith Fathallah, in an excellent Liber Quarterly overview of funding models for OA monographs: Book Processing Charges [BPCs] may have their place in the publishing landscape, and no doubt will be used across a range of models for the foreseeable future. But...