3 ms·

How much is the department paying for those journal subscriptions? Just redirect that cut journal subscription money that GP suggested into the open-access sub

• ac 11y ago
  It's not the departments that pay for subscriptions: it's the universities themselves (usually, the library).
• cowsandmilk 11y ago
  How budgets generally work: University pays for journal subscriptions. Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles. These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research articles will be distributed by the university as open access. This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for a graduate student. [1] http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_SalesChart.pdf http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_Sale... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees