2016 Charleston Library Conference

Open access is at the heart of a seismic shift in scholarly publishing. In particular, gold open access (OA) has expanded rapidly, increasing in market share every year. In the gold OA model, financial viability shifts from the demand to the supply side, with article processing charges (APCs) a common scenario. Ideally, this model would be sustainable for academic research institutions, in that, it would cost them cumulatively no more to pay APCs than they pay now in the traditional subscription model. APC-driven gold OA has financial and other implications for libraries, institutions, and authors. In the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded “Pay It Forward” project, we examined the viability of gold OA by looking at institutional costs, faculty and graduate student opinions, and various models for gold OA. The Pay It Forward research teams gathered a variety of qualitative and quantitative data from publishers, research libraries, and faculty and students including: current APC charges, current subscription charges, journal publication costs, opinions and behavior of graduate students and faculty members regarding publishing, reading, and OA. The speakers will discuss the findings of the research and the implications for the viability of the gold OA model.