The Uni has inked a deal that would allow researchers to publish their findings in over 4,500 different journals as open-access publications, for free, with more coming next year.
Under these new “Read and Publish” agreements, which kicked in at the start of this year, money the Uni was using for journal subscription fees will instead be put towards “article processing charges", which are charged to make articles open-access (i.e. freely available to all readers). This is big: until now, almost all of the research coming out of our publicly-funded universities has not been freely available to the very same public that funded the research, because it was hidden behind a paywall. This change means that taxpayers now have a direct line to the research that their tax dollars are supporting: yours. Assuming, of course, you get your head out of your arse and finally finish your Master’s.
Working in collaboration with other NZ and Aussie libraries, in the brutally-named Council of Australian University Libraries Content Procurement Consortium, the agreement covers six large academic publishers: Brill, Cambridge University Press, the Company of Biologists, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature and Wiley. This means that Otago researchers can now publish open-access materials in the 4,500 academic journals controlled by these companies - from the American Journal of Potato Research (“presenting authoritative coverage of new scientific developments in potato science”) to the presumably petrol-and-whiskey-soaked Thunderbird International Business Review.
Although the Uni spends over $8 million on access to journals every year (2013 figures), Head Librarian Mike Wall told Critic Te Arohi that the new agreements are “price-neutral” and won’t save the Uni much dosh. “However, there may be an overall cost saving if more Open Access articles are published than in the previous year,” he said. Additionally, these agreements mean more people can access Otago research, including members of the general public, who will no longer need to pay subscription fees to read them. You didn’t have to pay subscription fees because you’re a student, but trust us, those academic journals don’t come cheap. A notable example of this was a 1992 Nature article (not from Otago) titled “The Growing Inaccessibility of Science” which, if you weren't a student, used to cost $8.99 to read. It looks like the article is now free thanks to an open access agreement.
Conspicuously absent from the consortium of publishers is Elsevier. This 800-pound gorilla of academic publishing is behind journals like Cell, the Lancet and Geobios, and is also the largest recipient of subscription funds from the Uni (netting a cool $1.6 million in 2016). Their journals aren’t available for Otago open-access just yet. However, Mike did hint that “there will be more agreements finalised during 2022 for 2023, including at least one with another major publisher”. Wonder who that could be.