Policy for Co-investment of Open Access Subsidies or Memberships with UC Authorship

Approved by Collection Licensing Subgroup on October 17, 2014

A new policy would apply to open access resources such as BioMed Central, Nucleic Acids Research, PLoS and SCOAP3 where the library subsidies or memberships directly benefit UC authors who publish in these outlets via discounts or waivers on the APC fees.

Cost-shares for OA membership resources have, by previous agreement, been allocated according to UC authorship. This is viewed as an appropriate distribution of costs for OA membership, because the benefits accrue directly to the authors at those institutions who benefit from discounted OA fees.

CDL does not adjust co-investment shares every year for every resource as a rule for reasons of efficiency and scalability; however, authorship rates vary over time, and these resources may require more custom treatment. If publishers provide authorship data at each annual renewal, CDL will compile a 3-year rolling average of authorship rates and update the cost shares to reflect the most recent data. The rolling average will smooth out variances in publication rates from year to year.

If annual authorship data is not available, the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) will determine another way to assign costs for that specific OA resource.