Cornell Open Access Publication Fund (fall 2015 update)
2014-15 was a record year to date for Cornell research made freely accessible to the world with support of the Cornell Open Access Publication (COAP) fund. COAP supports the choice of Cornell authors (faculty, staff, and students) to publish in peer-reviewed, open access journals by underwriting “reasonable article processing fees” associated with OA publishing – fees that typically range from $1,300 to $2,500 per article. Administered by CUL, the COAP fund was established in the fall of 2009 with funds from the Library and the Office of the Provost.
The COAP program awarded funds to support open access publication of 39 articles by 35 Cornell authors over the 2014-15 fiscal year – more than double the number of articles reimbursed in the previous year. We can only speculate about the grounds for the dramatic increase. Awareness of the available funding has no doubt spread on campus, via Library outreach and word-of-mouth among researchers. But growing acceptance of open access publishing in the academy is surely playing a role as well. Since the fund was established in 2009, COAP has reimbursed costs for a total of 85 articles by 65 authors since from 34 different Cornell departments and programs. The articles appear in 38 different open access journals from a total of 20 publishers, both not-for-profit and commercial. The journals published by PLOS, “a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization founded to accelerate progress in science and medicine,” have by far the strongest representation, followed by the BioMed Central journals, which are owned by the commercial publisher Springer Science+Business Media.
The COAP fund is Cornell’s implementation of principles laid out in the multi-institutional Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) initiative, which began at Harvard in 2009. Cornell was among the original signatories to the Compact, which recognizes both the benefits of open access and the continuing value of scholarly publishers and emphasizes the need for sustainable funding for publishers that make the content in their journals openly accessible. Each COPE signatory institution pledged to establish “durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”
Cornell’s COAP fund is intended as a funding source of last resort and does not reimburse authors for article processing fees if other appropriate sources are available (e.g., some research grants allow use of grant funds for fees to publish results in open access venues). The COAP fund covers article processing fees only for articles published in “pure” open access journals, that is, publications in which all articles are open. Articles in “hybrid” open access journals – journals in which authors can opt to pay to make their individual articles freely accessible while the rest of the content remains behind a pay wall – are not reimbursable with COAP funds (see full COAP criteria). The COAP fund is jointly supported by CUL and Cornell’s Provost. The Library contribution, which comes from the collections budget, has been $25,000 per year.
– Kizer Walker, Director of Collections, CUL