On the heels of its recent arrangement with PLOS, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) has entered into a second contract to bundle the cost of journal subscriptions and Open Access (OA) publishing, this time with publisher, Cambridge University Press. Under this three-year contract, UI corresponding authors can publish their journal articles OA and free of cost to them, in any of Cambridge’s journals. These articles can then be read by anyone, anywhere, without the paywalls that traditionally accompany academic journals.
This arrangement is part of a larger effort by UI Libraries and the BTAA to reduce the cost of OA for individual researchers. Unfortunately, publishers often charge authors directly to pay for the cost of publishing OA journal articles. (For instance, Cambridge normally charges $2,520 per article for OA.) For faculty who don’t have grant or departmental funding, this can be prohibitively expensive. These costs have soared in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible.
As the Libraries continue to sign these types of transformative agreements, our hope is that more and more of our faculty will be able to publish their research OA without fees.