I'm supposed to burn a mandatory OA budget and we have A&A for free... PASP, which we have a transformative agreement with, overtook all other default major journals in IF and SJR... so here I am thinking why submit to ApJ/MNRAS and pay anything at all? 😅
But mainly because of the gratuitously high OA fees charged by publishers, no? I don't understand why more people in astro don't take the approach "it's going to be on arxiv anyway so why pay extra for OA"?
In the UK, at least, "gold" (paid) open access is now required by funders and/or govt. So what's driving this is basically that future (and even current) funding is dependent on paying those OA fees.
It's the same in a lot of places. Several of the big EU funding schemes now mandate gold open access too, as do a number of national funding agencies across Europe.
I think it was really suboptimal when MNRAS and PASA adopted this funding model over the last couple of years and argued against it at the time - I hope we can turn things around
If funders are going to require OA, then they need to fully fund it. And those publishing without such funds need free top journal options.
Many journals like PASP have “transformative agreements” with universities, so no publication charges. AAS offers waivers. I think A&A is free for Europeans?
MNRAS now has such an agreement with all UK univs, so it's still effectively free-to-publish for UK astronomers. The main impact of the OA move seems to have been silo-ing us all back to only publishing in our "local" journals. (UK researchers can no also longer publish for free in A&A.)
Astronomy is in the super favourable position of having all major journals belonging to learned societies. Thus any profits in principle returned to the community.
Are you sure about that? It used to be that particularly prestigious astronomy articles were submitted not to astronomy-only journals, but to Science (mostly for US people) or Nature (for European astronomers). High-profile articles like that were important for getting the good jobs.
The Science and Nature publications are definitely impactful, but IMO they don't make up the bulk of the astro's progress. The work that *collectively* moves the field forward is generally found in AJ, ApJ, etc.
It only returns to the communities lucky enough to have societies with high-impact journals. Meanwhile, I (and many of my fellow Aussie astronomers) are now facing a reality where we can’t afford to publish: read&pub agreements have failed & grant funding is too limited to cover the costs.
Indeed. It used to work ok for astronomy in the old system. Green OA through astro-ph and ‘free’ publishing via the subscriptions of ‘wealthier’ libraries.
New model: library budgets diverted to page charges and the rich countries giving money to publishers directly whether we publish or not.
I am no authority on the matter so don't take my word for it but I have no particular reason to think they restrict their waivers to American authors—AAS is an international organization.
I know Iranian authors are guaranteed zero publication fees, for instance.
Fun fact, the mass migration of European authors nearly broke A&A last year. They were close to exceeding the max page count the publisher agreed to handle.
The question though is why funders are requiring extremely costly OA? There are feasible and readily-available routes to universal access to publicly-funded research that don't involve throwing £millions at publishers.
I am not familiar with British requirements on this.
I do get the sense many European bureaucrats hoped the move to OA would send price-conscious authors to at-cost society journals and starve the for-profit publishers out of business.
But then the lobbyists got their hands on things. Most funders now require open access, but also set rules such that paid-for open access is effectively the only allowed option (e.g., the pan-European "Plan S"). Journals like MN were basically forced to move from a subscription model to author-pays.
I think that was the original intent, but in practice the post-lobbying version of the legislation ended up requiring that even more research funding is funnelled to publishers than was the case beforehand.
Comments
[Similar discussion of this from a few months ago below.]
https://bsky.app/profile/richardalexander.bsky.social/post/3lgptbiyi622p
https://astro.theoj.org/post/3096-the-cost-of-the-open-journal-of-astrophysics
Many journals like PASP have “transformative agreements” with universities, so no publication charges. AAS offers waivers. I think A&A is free for Europeans?
We were dragged into this by the OA zealots.
New model: library budgets diverted to page charges and the rich countries giving money to publishers directly whether we publish or not.
Also, PASP has transformative agreements with many universities, including University of Southern Queensland. Check with your university librarian.
https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/questions/researchers-from-australia/
I know Iranian authors are guaranteed zero publication fees, for instance.
I do get the sense many European bureaucrats hoped the move to OA would send price-conscious authors to at-cost society journals and starve the for-profit publishers out of business.
Arguing that astronomy already had green OA was insufficient for the absolutists.