Yale Library opens up new publishing opportunities for researchers and scholars

Yale University Library has signed open access agreements with two prominent publishers of academic journals to eliminate the article processing charges (APCs) formerly paid by individual Yale authors in favor of an annual fee paid by the library. The agreements provide new publishing opportunities for Yale researchers while also ensuring that emerging scholarship is broadly available without the barrier of expensive journal subscriptions.

The agreements provide members of the Yale community with access to all journal content and unlimited opportunities to choose open access publication of their work with these publishers:

• Portland Press—the publishing arm of the Biochemical Society—publishes seven journals in molecular biosciences. Yale Library’s agreement waives APC fees for Yale authors publishing in any of the seven journals.
•  Cambridge University Press, the oldest publishing press in the world, publishes hundreds of fully and hybrid open access publications in a wide range of academic disciplines. Yale Library’s new agreement waives APCs for Yale authors publishing in nearly 400 Cambridge journals that are fully open access or have an open access option.

Open access (OA) publishing is part of a growing, shared effort among publishers and institutes of higher learning to remove barriers to scholarship access and dissemination. The effort has two goals. One goal is to ensure that researchers can read digital versions of the latest publications in their disciplines, free of charge, in order to encourage increased sharing and usage of content. On its website, Cambridge University Press reports that “seventy-five percent of OA articles get more citations than their non-OA equivalents, receiving on average thirty to fifty percent more citations.”

A second goal is to encourage authors to opt to make their accepted articles open access by removing the costs to individual authors or their academic departments of publishing open access.

Last year, the library signed an agreement with PLOS—a non-profit, open access publisher of seven highly respected scientific and medical journals—that allows Yale authors to publish in any PLOS journal without paying APCs. For more information about the library’s support of open access publishing, see the library’s open access guide.

Yale authors are invited to a Cambridge University Press webinar on June 15 outlining the basics of open access and highlighting key benefits for researchers. Register for “The OA Advantage” webinar. Portland Press offers a guide to the Read and Publish workflow.

—by Deborah Cannarella