Psyche, Science, and Society

American Psychological Association tries to make money off of open access research depository, backs down

July 16th, 2008

To many academics and researchers the American Psychological Association is largely known as the publisher of many high quality, and high status, journals. the National Institutes of Health recently required that all research funded y the NIH deposit publications in an open source depository. APA evidently tried to make money off this process, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday:

July 15, 2008
Psychological Association Will Charge Authors for Open-Access Archiving

By Lila Guterman

In what appears to be a new policy, the American Psychological Association will require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories — and it will charge them $2,500 to do so.

Researchers who have grants from the National Institutes of Health must deposit their published articles in the institutes’ online archive, PubMed Central. Last week the journal Nature and many of its offshoots announced that they would deposit their authors’ articles for them. Free.

Now the psychological association says that its authors “should NOT deposit” their own manuscripts, and instead should allow the group to do so. “The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university,” the policy says.

Because the NIH does not charge a fee, that money is apparently going to the psychological association.

Open-access advocates like Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, expressed outrage. “It’s as bad as it looks,” he told The Chronicle. “This is not a good use of anybody’s money.” Depositing an article in PubMed Central, he said, is a “clerical job that can be done by a machine.”

The psychological association did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Chronicle.

This report, or other negative reaction appears to hve led the APA to back down. When one follows the link to their web site, one now sees:

Document Deposit Policy and Procedures for APA Journals

A new document deposit policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) requiring a publication fee to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently being re-examined and will not be implemented at this time. This policy had recently been announced on APA’s Web site. APA will soon be releasing more detailed information about the complex issues involved in the implementation of the new NIH Public Access Policy.

APA will continue to deposit NIH-funded manuscripts on behalf of authors in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

To continue with these charges could lead many more academics and researchers to leave the APA, as any such fees would be taken, directly or indirectly, by their universities out of the grants, reducing already limited research funds. And non-APA journals would instantly become more attractive publishing venues.

Entry Filed under: APA, Psychology, Research Methods