Tag: open access publication fees

Towards an Open Science Publishing Platform

By on February 8, 2016

Vitek Tracz photo

Bring your lunch and join Vitek Tracz and Micah Altman from the Libraries’ Information Science program for this February Brown Bag. This program is suitable for those already published and those looking to be published.

The traditional way of publishing new findings in journals is becoming increasingly outdated and no longer serves the needs of much of science. Vitek Tracz will discuss a new approach being developed by F1000, an Open Science Platform, that combines immediate publication (like a preprint) with formal, invited, and transparent post-publication peer review. This bypasses the many problems of the current journal system and, in doing so, moves the evaluation of research and researchers away from the journal-based Impact Factor and towards a fairer system of article-based qualitative and quantitative indicators. In the long term, it should be irrelevant where a researcher publishes his or her findings. In addition to this this new way to publish research, Vitek will also describe the other two components of the F1000: F1000Prime, an article-level recommendation and evaluation service from over 12,000 leading researchers, and F1000Workspace, a set of tools to help authors to discover literature, collect reference libraries, write articles, and collaborate.

About Vitek Tracz
Tracz has studied mathematics, cinema, and art history, collaborated on a feature film, and developed the first mobile phone navigation company. An early internet presence, Tracz launched BioMed Net, an online community for scientists in 1996, and Biomed Central, the first open-access journal, two years later. He founded the Current Opinion journals and piloted other innovative publishing projects before tackling his latest initiative, F1000, whose “Open Science Platform” supports publication of all findings (negative results, case reports, observational studies) and features speedy publication, open peer review, and includes source data for easy replication.

Location: E25-117

February 23, 2016 12 - 1pm

MIT Libraries Offer Aid to MIT authors publishing in Open Access Journals

By on June 10, 2010

The MIT Libraries have established a special fund, the MIT Open Access Article Publication Subvention Fund (OAAPSF), to support equity in open access publication by providing funding to MIT authors who might not otherwise be able to cover publication fees. A subsidy of up to $1,000 per article is now available to faculty authors publishing in eligible journals.

The fund was created as a result of MIT’s commitment to the “Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity,” launched with four other founding universities last September. The goal of the compact is to allow subscription-based journals and open access journals to compete on a more level playing field by providing equitable support for the processing-fee business model for open-access journals. As Provost Rafael Reif reflected when the Compact was launched: “The dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right of research universities: it is their obligation. Open-access publishing promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around the world. This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the guiding principles of this compact.”

The fund is being initiated as a pilot project, in cooperation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System, with the initial goal of determining faculty interest in and financial requirements of such a fund at MIT.

Eligibility

This fund is intended to be a last resort for use when no alternative source of funding is available. Current MIT faculty are eligible to use the fund, for articles that will be submitted for publication after June 1, 2010 in open-access journals that:

Articles reporting on research that was supported by funders that allow research funds to be used for publication fees (e.g. NIH) are not eligible for this funding, whether or not publication costs were specifically included in the grant. The subsidy is limited to $1,000 per article, regardless of the number of authors.

If you have any questions about eligibility for or use of the fund, please contact copyright-lib@mit.edu.
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More information on the fund:
FAQ on the purpose, scope, and use of the fund

More background on the Compact:
MIT news story
Compact web site
Inside Higher Ed article
PLoS article by Compact author and Harvard professor Stuart Shieber