12 Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
APC FUND DISCONTINUED
2. Please enter the year the fund was discontinued. N=14
Year N
2011 1
2012 1
2013 3
2014 3
2015 5
2016 1
3. Please indicate why the fund was discontinued. Check all that apply. N=14
Lack of funding 10 71%
Lack of author interest 4 29%
Lack of administrative support 3 21%
Other reason 9 64%
Please briefly describe the other reason. N=9
Authors most often funded have other options for funding APCs.
Funding APCs proved to be unsustainable.
It was a two-year pilot program.
Ours was a 6-month pilot project to gauge the interest in and feasibility of offering this kind of service.
The pilot project was funded by the University Libraries and the Health Sciences Library, with the
understanding that funding for an ongoing service would need to come from outside of the Libraries.
Another funding source has not yet been identified.
The Libraries’ OA Fund pilot was successful and garnered a wealth of positive feedback from authors.
Since the purpose of the fund is to promote a broader transition to OA publishing, however, we believe
that the $25k allocation could be spent more effectively on other initiatives, including memberships
and pledges with innovative open access journal and monograph publishers, and library publishing
cooperatives. The data supplied in this survey represents the second full year of the fund in operation.
The fund assisted very few authors and was not utilized by many, but fully utilized/expended. It
was not deemed to be an appropriate use of library resources by senior administration and not an
appropriate role for the library. The library determined that the notion of author fees was not really
advancing open access and was in fact creating access issues of a different kind—access to scholarly
publishing, tenure and promotion, etc. It was also not really solving the issues around containment of
resource costs, as there was now just another set of escalating costs. Multiple reasons for abandoning/
discontinuing the fund.
The fund was unsustainable at scale, and in my view, a poor return on investment. It was mostly repeat
players and people abusing co-authoring.
Unsustainable.
We didn’t have a policy in place to market the fund initially. In succeeding years we did not have
adequate collections funding to continue. Funding was available for 2014/2015 but nothing was
expended due to all the reasons checked above.
APC FUND DISCONTINUED
2. Please enter the year the fund was discontinued. N=14
Year N
2011 1
2012 1
2013 3
2014 3
2015 5
2016 1
3. Please indicate why the fund was discontinued. Check all that apply. N=14
Lack of funding 10 71%
Lack of author interest 4 29%
Lack of administrative support 3 21%
Other reason 9 64%
Please briefly describe the other reason. N=9
Authors most often funded have other options for funding APCs.
Funding APCs proved to be unsustainable.
It was a two-year pilot program.
Ours was a 6-month pilot project to gauge the interest in and feasibility of offering this kind of service.
The pilot project was funded by the University Libraries and the Health Sciences Library, with the
understanding that funding for an ongoing service would need to come from outside of the Libraries.
Another funding source has not yet been identified.
The Libraries’ OA Fund pilot was successful and garnered a wealth of positive feedback from authors.
Since the purpose of the fund is to promote a broader transition to OA publishing, however, we believe
that the $25k allocation could be spent more effectively on other initiatives, including memberships
and pledges with innovative open access journal and monograph publishers, and library publishing
cooperatives. The data supplied in this survey represents the second full year of the fund in operation.
The fund assisted very few authors and was not utilized by many, but fully utilized/expended. It
was not deemed to be an appropriate use of library resources by senior administration and not an
appropriate role for the library. The library determined that the notion of author fees was not really
advancing open access and was in fact creating access issues of a different kind—access to scholarly
publishing, tenure and promotion, etc. It was also not really solving the issues around containment of
resource costs, as there was now just another set of escalating costs. Multiple reasons for abandoning/
discontinuing the fund.
The fund was unsustainable at scale, and in my view, a poor return on investment. It was mostly repeat
players and people abusing co-authoring.
Unsustainable.
We didn’t have a policy in place to market the fund initially. In succeeding years we did not have
adequate collections funding to continue. Funding was available for 2014/2015 but nothing was
expended due to all the reasons checked above.
