UT signs deal with science journal for free publishing, article access  – The Daily Texan

A science journal announced Sept. 17 that it signed a $1 million agreement with UT that allows professors to publish their work as open access, or without fees, so students and researchers can access their articles without paying.

Without special agreements, professors pay high one-time fees called article processing charges, or APCs, per paper they publish to keep it publicly available. The new agreement with Springer Nature, the publishing journal, is a transformative agreement, which are deals that reduce or completely eliminate the fees researchers and professors pay for their work to be available online without paywalls.

The agreement covers unlimited APCs for publishing research in journals branded Springer, Palgrave and Adis. Nature-branded journals, such as Nature Biology, are not included in the agreement because it would have been “prohibitively expensive,” said Alexia Thompson-Young, assistant director of scholarly resources at the University’s library.

The University’s libraries’ efforts to negotiate with publishers helped bring about the agreement, Thompson-Young said. Since 2020, the University’s libraries have talked with every publisher they negotiate with about whether they have an open-access model they can be a part of. The list of current UT open access partnerships that include full and partial coverage of APCs is online.

Michael Aubrey, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, said the fees can be as high as $5,000. Professors pay the fee out of research funds that would otherwise be used to pay for researchers and lab supplies, he said.

Aubrey said that although he would benefit from the agreement and would still publish in Springer Nature’s journals because of their reach, he prefers publishing in smaller nonprofit ones, such as professional societies that align with his area of study.

Chandrajit Bajaj, a computer science professor and computational applied mathematics chair in visualization at the Oden Institute, said fees can prevent researchers from publishing if they do not have a grant.

“Any way of reducing the fees is always welcome,” Bajaj said.

Thompson-Young said universities and researchers pay big, for-profit publishers because they provide services that would be hard to replace.

“There’s this whole world out there that has to be paid for and managed,” Thompson-Young said. “It’s not something that the library can do well on their own, and it’s not something that I think an author would want to spend their time on.”