Three agreements made between UAB Libraries and top journal publishers have saved authors more than $1.1 million in costs associated with publishing in open access journals since 2021.
Read-and-publish agreements with publishers Wiley and Springer Nature have saved UAB authors more than $718,000 and $311,000, respectively. They enable lead or corresponding authors affiliated with the university to publish open access in any fully open access or hybrid open access Wiley or Springer Nature journal at no cost to the author — nearly 4,000 journals in total. An additional smaller, yet significant read-and-publish agreement with Cambridge Publishing has saved more than $76,000.
The cost-saving mechanism in these agreements waives the article processing fee (APC) for UAB authors. Unlike traditional publishing systems, open access journals do not require a subscription to access paywalled resources, so to offset that loss of revenue, most collect a charge in order to publish. The average APC cost is just over $1,600, according to an article published earlier this year in Sci Ed. Through UAB Libraries’ agreements, 197 APCs have been funded for Wiley publications since Jan. 1, 2023, with 73 funded for Springer Nature publications since Jan. 1 of this year and 26 funded for Cambridge since January 2021.
With a click of a button or swipe of a phone, UAB employees and students can access millions of online resources with just their BlazerID and password — but those same resources would come at a high cost to unaffiliated individual scholars, clinicians, patients, consumers, policymakers and others who could benefit from accessing resources. When scholarship is published as open access — such as in well-known and highly cited journals like ones published by Wiley and Springer Nature — it removes that financial barrier and better facilitates the sharing of important information.
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“We are committed to furthering our campus culture of collaboration and innovation through collaborations with external partners — and the significant financial impact of these read-and-publish agreements is a clear demonstration of that.” |
Continuing to prioritize a commitment to open access publishing is crucial for UAB’s mission to drive research and innovation across the enterprise, as outlined in UAB’s strategic plan, Forging Ahead, said Jeff Graveline, J.D., associate dean for Research and Scholarly Communication and director of the Office of Scholarly Communication in UAB Libraries.
“These agreements help ensure that UAB’s scholarly research is available at no cost on a global scale,” Graveline explained. “We are committed to furthering our campus culture of collaboration and innovation through collaborations with external partners — and the significant financial impact of these read-and-publish agreements is a clear demonstration of that.”
Authors from across disciplines have utilized these agreements to publish their work open access — from the schools of Nursing and Education to the Collat School of Business and Heersink School of Medicine. Read testimonials from five faculty researchers who have had one or more APCs waived — and why they feel OA publishing is so important.
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“Making my research open access is very important to the applied science of management. Too often, our intellectual contributions are hidden behind paywalls, where practitioners cannot access them. In Collat, we strive for impact, and there is no greater impact than seeing our ideas put into action in the business communities that we serve. Making our research open access is essential for us to truly have impact in our communities.”
— Allen Gorman, Ph.D., associate professor of management and chair of the Department of Management, Information Systems, and Quantitative Methods in the Collat School of Business
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"Making my research available through open access was a deliberate decision rooted in the belief that knowledge should be accessible to all, regardless of institutional affiliations. My work focuses on mental health, a field where the implications of research extend far beyond academia. By ensuring that practitioners, particularly those without access to university libraries, can read my articles, I hope to bridge the gap between research and real-world application. Open access allows for wider dissemination, which is crucial for supporting mental health professionals who need up-to-date research to inform their practice and ensure mental health care."
— Yusen Zhai, Ph.D., assistant professor of counseling in the Department of Human Studies and director of the UAB Community Counseling Clinic in the School of Education
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“Making my research available open access has improved my visibility as an early-stage investigator and promotes equitable access to our research findings.”
— Jenni Wise, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Family, Community, and Health Systems in the School of Nursing
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"The support we’ve received for making our article open access has been invaluable. Our research weaves together the history of midwife training, early nurse-midwifery education, and the contributions of public health nurses in the early 20th-century Alabama. By publicly sharing and disseminating this research, particularly the history of midwifery education at Tuskegee University and early nurse-midwifery in Alabama, we have already seen readers express how crucial they find this work. We chose open access because we believe making our research available to a wider audience ensures that the important stories and lessons from our history can reach and inspire more people."
— Sharon Holley, DNP, associate professor in the Department of Acute, Chronic, and Continuing Care in the School of Nursing
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“Translational biomedical research aims to make significant discoveries with high potential to advance medical knowledge and improve human lives. The quickest way to achieve these goals is to make research publication widely available to all through Open Access. I decide to make my article Open Access not only because we made an important discovery on molecular mimicry in peripheral nerves with broad implications to human autoimmune disease and transplant rejection, but due to the relationship between Wiley and UAB Libraries that covered the costs. For me, this was a win-win situation that demonstrates UAB's commitment to sharing faculty scientific discoveries globally for the benefit of humankind."
— Eroboghene Ubogu, M.D., professor in and director of the Division of Neuromuscular Disease in the Department of Neurology in the Heersink School of Medicine
Got questions? UAB Libraries can help
Do you have questions about making your work more accessible through Open Access publishing? The Office of Scholarly Communication can help. And that’s not all they do — the OSC can answer questions from Blazers working to establish publishing agreements and understand copyright guidelines, plus provide guidance on incorporating affordable instructional materials into courses.
During the last year, the OSC expanded to include research data management services, offering consultations with researchers to prepare data management plans or select repositories for data. The office also provides instruction on how to organize, document and properly safeguard research data to benefit both research teams and the wider research community long-term.
Learn more about the OSC online.
Open Access Publishing: What’s in it for me? — Oct. 22