An excellent if deeply worrying piece on Open Access, APCs and the challenges and threats facing academics and institutions…

The Disorder Of Things

This is the text of a document prepared by Meera and me on Article Processing Charges as currently understood and the serious risks we think they pose to academic freedom and funding, broadly understood (previous discussed by severalcontributors toour openaccess series). It is also available as a pdf, and we encourage academics to think carefully about the issues foregrounded, and to act accordingly.

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Summary

• The Government is pushing academic publishing to a ‘pay-to-say’ model in order to achieve open access to publicly funded research
• This ‘gold’ route to open access, which levies Article Processing Charges (as proposed in the Finch Report and taken up by RCUK and HEFCE) poses a major problem for academics in the UK:
  • It threatens academic freedom through pressures on institutions to distribute scarce APC resources and to judge work by standards other than peer review
  • It threatens research funding by…

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