About-Face: Psychological Association Will Not Charge for Open Access - Chronicle.com

About-Face: Psychological Association Will Not Charge for Open Access - Chronicle.com 

About-Face: Psychological Association Will Not Charge for Open Access

Apparently charging scholarly authors $2,500 to place their articles in a free online database wasn’t such a good idea. Facing withering criticism from open-access advocates, the American Psychological Association has announced that the fee policy “is currently being re-examined and is not being implemented at this time.”

After the plan to charge authors and their universities was reported by The Chronicle last week, some critics called the psychological association “cash-flow hounds.” The association had planned to levy the charge against authors for placing their articles in PubMed Central, the online database run by the National Institutes of Health.

The fee put researchers in a bind because the NIH’s guidelines require scientists with its grants to place their articles in the database, but the psychological-association plan would charge those researchers a fee for complying with the rule. An association official told The Chronicle that the group was considering the fee to recoup lost revenue from journal subscriptions and licenses due to open access.

Peter Suber, in the Open Access News blog, says he applauds the change of heart but worries that the new position is only temporary because the association says the policy is still being re-examined. —Josh Fischman

About-Face: Psychological Association Will Not Charge for Open Access - Chronicle.com