After signed another publishing agreement, and I was, once again, taken aback by the exorbitant OA fees that publishers charge.

Publishing open access with us (gold OA) lets you share and re-use your article immediately after publication.

The article processing charge (APC) to publish an article open access in Educational technology research and development is:

Article processing charge (excluding local taxes)
£2,290.00 / $3,290.00 / €2,590.00

Some organisations will pay some or all of your APC.

If you want to publish subscription, instead of open access, there will be an option to do that in the following steps.

I know, I know, we probably shouldn’t have submitted to journal that isn’t gold and free OA by default, *but* the system is structured in such ways that my junior co-authors would benefit from being published in this journal.

While not a solution to this problem, it’s worth noting the terms in the publishing agreement around sharing the article. This is in the terms:

The Assignee grants to the Author (i) the right to make the Accepted Manuscript available on their own personal, self-maintained website immediately on acceptance.

This is the approach that I use for nearly all my papers, but it’s worth remembering that what this really does is suggest an individual solution to a systemic problem, which will do little to solve the broader problem of lack of access to research.

There are other statements in the terms around placing one’s article in an institutional repository, but author self-archiving is generally the first and immediate option available to individuals. And perhaps google scholar will index the author’s personal website, making the article available, as shown below. Google scholar’s approach of identifying articles and placing publicly-available versions in search results is a systemic solution to the problem. Unpaywall is similar in that respect.

 

[To be clear: this post isn’t about ETR&D. It’s about the publishers & the publishing system]