Defray scholarly journals’ peer-review costs with per-paper charge, study advises. Paul Jump writes
Major journals could move to an open-access model if they charged a fee for every paper submitted to them, a study has suggested.
Most open-access journals are currently funded solely via charges to the authors of papers accepted for publication.
However, high-profile journals such as Science and Nature do not offer open-access options on the grounds that their high rejection rates would force them to impose prohibitively high charges in order to cover the cost of administering peer review.
But a new report commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, the European association of organisations committed to open access, says that a better business model for journals that reject more than 70 per cent of submitted articles would be to combine charges for accepted papers – known as article-processing charges – with submission fees.
Read full article in Times Higher Education.