Journal of the APA to Go Open Access - Daily Nous (2024)

Wonderful news! May others follow the JAPA!

It’s about time!

I am cautious about the flip, although I appreciate the good intentions. At the moment Cambridge’s APC, the APC the blog post says will apply as well to JAPA, is $3,450. The promise that, if no other funding is available to you, that it will be waived, is quite vague, and specific to JAPA–no other Cambridge journal makes this promise, nor is it quite clear that they have any outstanding provision for it.
A case in point: the last journal to flip to OA via an existing publisher (rather than through by going self-hosted on Janeway like Ergo/PImprint), Thought, suggested in their announcement of the change that those who lacked funding would have the APC of $1,500 covered. Today their editorial guidelines, and OA agreement guidelines, make no mention of this. There’s no box for ‘I’m an adjunct at a college with no research funding’, merely for your credit card number. It might be that in a sort of off-the-record fashion a waiver is still possible, but to me the prospects look poor when they no longer make any mention of it in public materials.
In the grand scheme of things, publisher-led OA flips need to be seen simply as redistributing the costs of running a journal from library budgets to nebulous ‘research funds’, if not authors. This is understandable in Europe, or in the California system, because all large research institutions have such funds. But America, unlike Europe, lacks national research councils to cut deals with publishers, and also unlike Europe has many small institutions which do not allocate funds for APCs and are endangered financially already. These small institutions nevertheless retain library budgets, if library budgets which are gradually being cut. But, there is no reason to believe that resources saved in cutting will be made available for APCs; there is in fact much evidence to the contrary.
Publisher-led OA flips also have the deleterious effect, as we have seen in the cases of Wiley journals, of incentivising journals not on the basis of the indispensability of the content therein but on the sheer quantity of articles published, and thereby quantity of APCs. In the long run it seems likely that the pressures Wiley has exerted upon journal editors to publish more will become more or less the norm.
None of this is true of scholar-led OA flips, for the record. I have nothing but admiration for the APC-free OA journals like Ergo, Philosophers’ Imprint, and the new JPP & PPA. It is true that these journals are run much leaner, and rely on volunteer labour, but they at least do not suppress publications by those at less well-off institutions. But, this is not the direction JAPA has gone (although I would suggest, given the not insignificant resources of the APA, it is likely something they should investigate).
(Comment reposted from Philosophers’ Cocoon, alongside the post).

Thank you for the interest and comments. The Editorial Team, the APA, and Cambridge University Press have ensured that EVERY author of an accepted paper at JAPA will be able to publish Open Access. For Authors whose institutions do not have agreements with the publisher, and/or who aren’t using grant/institutional funds, the cost of publishing OA will be waived.