URI supports the following open access publishing initiatives:

A note on OA memberships:

Some open access publishers (e.g. BioMed Central, Hindawi, Public Library of Science, F1000Research) offer fee-based institutional memberships that provide discounts on publication charges to authors affiliated with the institution. Harvard's Stuart Shieber argues against these memberships because they favor some OA publishers over others, result in the university paying publication charges that should be covered by grant funders, and have the potential to result in hyperinflation of fees by interfering with market efficiencies.

With the exception of JAFSCD and our MDPI membership which is free (all listed above), the University of Rhode Island does not participate in these memberships at this time.

It's also worth remembering that many OA publications do not charge any fees at all. In fact, only about 25% of journals listed in the DOAJ charge author fees for open access (though about half of all OA articles are published in fee-collecting journals).

URI supports the following open access / scholarly communication infrastructure initiatives:

Open access "transformative agreements," also called "read-and-publish" agreements, allow authors affiliated with subscribing institutions to publish articles in journals open access without paying an article processing charge. Articles published open access are freely available, however articles not published OA are still behind a paywall. The library's fees fund access to both subscriber-only content as well as APC's for affiliated authors.

The argument for transformative agreements is that this model allows publishers to transition away from a pricing model that relies on subscription revenue and toward a model that is fully open access, funded by APCs. The arguments against transformative agreements are many. Most publishers that offer these agreements are not transparent about their costs and offer no firm date when they will make the transition to fully open access publishing. It is possible that transformative agreements, because they enable publishers to collect both subscription fees and APCs, actually disincentivize a transition to full open access. In addition, some argue that publishing models based on APCs create barriers to publishing for authors from institutions and regions with fewer resources, increasing inequities in the scholarly communication system. Further, supporting APCs through this model channels funding to the largest publishers and diverts resources from other, more innovative, OA strategies, for example "diamond open access" which does not charge APCs at all. (See the "OA publishing initiatives" box above.) Finally, the APC model creates opportunities for low quality, "predatory" OA publishers. Therefore, it is possible that supporting "transformative agreements" will slow the transition to OA, result in an OA system that costs more than it needs to, and decrease the diversity of scholarly voices.

Despite these reservations, URI currently participates in the following "transformative agreements."

Hybrid open access describes open access provided by subscription journals to select articles. Authors must pay a publication fee to make their articles available open access. Except in cases when a publisher has made a public commitment to transition to full open access, open access advocates are critical of hybrid open access. Many publishers with hybrid options are not transparent about how or whether publication fees reduce subscription charges, and the growth of hybrid OA in recent years has not lead to an overall decrease in costs. There is little evidence that hybrid OA is helping bring about a transition to full open access; in fact, the opposite may be true.

Furthermore, hybrid OA APCs tend to be higher than APCs in fully OA journals. Before paying to publish in a hybrid journal, you may wish to check the DOAJ or other sites for fully OA journals in your field. Or, you can publish in a subscription journal for free and make your work open access by depositing your final peer-reviewed manuscript in DigitalCommons@URI in compliance with the URI Open Access Policy.

Note that the URI Open Access Fund does not support publication in hybrid OA journals.

These hybrid OA publishers offer discounts to URI authors because the University Libraries subscribes to their content:

For more information on URI's support for open access initiatives, contact Andrée Rathemacher at andree@uri.edu.