Are the Open Access movement and UCs eScholarship repository helping to control costs?
The Library is monitoring developments in a variety of alternative models for scholarly publishing including open access and digital repositories. The existence of these alternatives, when provided outside the normal publishing infrastructure, have indeed put pressure on publishers to change, if not their actual charges, at least their thinking. Many publishers are themselves now offering an “open access” option, but they are charging a hefty fee to authors to do so. Institutional digital repositories also provide information free to the reader, and some repositories like UC’s eScholarship also provide support for peer review and author services. Uptake by authors, however, has been slow.
