Who benefits from the University of Calgary authors' fund?

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

**	with apologies for cross-posting	**

Who benefits from the University of Calgary authors' fund?  This 
was a useful question raised at a talk this week by Andrew 
Waller, at the University of British Columbia.

In my opinion, there are two main groups of beneficiaries:

U of C faculty and students

University of Calgary faculty and senior students who wish to 
publish in OA journals that charge article processing fees and 
have no funds available.  Not that every request will be 
approved; but at least, there is a place to make a request with 
some hope of getting funding.

Everyone involved in scholarly communication.

Even at this early date, the investigative work done by U of C 
has resulted in procedures that identify that it makes sense to 
fund fully open access journals, such as Public Library of 
Science, BioMedCentral, and Hindawi, as well as hybrid options of 
publishers that reduce subscription rates for libraries on the 
basis of revenue from open access fees - like Oxford.  This is a 
great model for other libraries; if other libraries follow this 
example, in my opinion the odds that publishers will plan to 
decrease subscription fees on the basis of OA revenue will 
quickly and significantly increase.

PLEASE NOTE:  the majority of open access journals do NOT charge 
article processing fees, and it is not necessary to publish in an 
open access journal to make your work OA.  The green road, 
publishing in a traditional journal and self-archiving for open 
access, is another avenue and one that U of C recommends as 
appropriate as an alternative to the authors' fund.

A more detailed version of this message is available on The Imaginary
Journal of Poetic Economics, at:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2008/11/who-benefits-from-
university-of-calgary.html

Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, and
does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic Library
Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com