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RSS feedsCambridge University Press has made 15 of its journals open access. Contributors will be able to have their paper made freely available online as soon as it is accepted for publication.
Authors, their institution or funding body, will have to pay a £1,500 fee to cover costs.
Gavin Swanson, STM editor-in-chief at Cambridge Journals , said the fee reflected the real costs of online publication.
He said: “Responses to the fees range from the expected complaint that they are too high for individuals to pay, to growing acknowledgement that they are realistic and reflect what it does in fact cost to publish a paper.”
Stevan Harnad, information professional and proponent of open access, welcomed the move: “There is now nothing more that the OA movement can reasonably ask of a publisher that CUP has not already done, having given all of its authors the green light to provide OA to their own articles if they wish, and having even begun to test the waters of OA publishing. Yes, at £1,500 the cost is not small, but this is an experiment, and OA publishing involves some risk to publishers, so the waters need to be tested cautiously.”
Ian Banbery, marketing director of the CUP journals division, said: “As a new business model for journals publishers the OA idea needs exploring and understanding by all in the publication chain. It may or may not be viable, and there are serious questions about its sustainability for academics working in humanities and social sciences, but as a serious academic publisher Cambridge needs to test all possible options.”
After assessing its experience with this defined set of Cambridge-owned STM journals, CUP’s next step will be to bring OA to journals it publishes on behalf of learned societies.
In July, CUP bought out the 15 STM journals published by CABI. “We are going to make a significant investment in journals over the next 18 months,” Banbery said.
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