From: Peter Binfield <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 10:23:01 -0700 Of interest to this list, we just provided a detailed blog post explaining the options and pricing mechanism for an Institutional Arrangement at PeerJ (whereby a library can bulk purchase, or pre-pay, for PeerJ publication plans). The post is at: http://blog.peerj.com/post/85002106083/how-an-institutional-arrangement-works-at-peerj and the full text is reproduced below Pete Binfield Publisher, PeerJ How an Institutional Arrangement Works at PeerJ Most publishers don't talk about the details of the institutional deals they sign with Universities. In fact some publishers even include gagging clauses in their contracts which explicitly prevent their library customers from talking about how much they are paying, and for what! PeerJ has no such 'gagging clause' for our customers - they are free to talk about what they bought and what they paid. Therefore, we thought it would be informative to lay out the options, which can be entered into by an institutional customer of PeerJ (https://peerj.com/edu/) - customers which include Berkeley, Stanford, Cambridge, Amsterdam and many more. At PeerJ, individual authors purchase Lifetime Publication Plans for a one-off, low priced payment (e.g. $139 'at the point of acceptance' for the Basic Plan; $239 for the Enhanced Plan; and $339 for the Investigator Plan). Once they have a plan, they can then publish future papers with us for free, for life (Basic Plan holders can publish 1 per year, and the highest tier allows unlimited publications per year). All co-authors on a paper need to have a paid plan of some level. More details at https://peerj.com/pricing/. We then have three options for libraries who want to fund Publication Plans for their faculty: 1. A simple 'bulk purchase' of individual plans, which an institution can hand out to their faculty as they see fit. 2. A 'pre-payment account' approach where an institution deposits an amount of money with PeerJ. As authors from that institution submit to us, they then get the option of paying for their plans from that pre-paid account (drawing down as that happens). 3. Or a university can simply agree to cover our fees on a case by case basis without going through PeerJ. In that case, they can still have a listing on our Institution page to explain how their fund works (see MIT for for example). The advantage of option #1 is that there is very little administration for a library to worry about once the plans are purchased (the library receives 'activation codes' which they distribute by email). The advantage of option #2 is that a library doesn't need to worry about the politics of who receives or uses each plan, as it is automatically applied to each individual as they naturally come to publish with us. An advantage with both options is that they represent a 'one off' purchase for a library (i.e. there is no recurring commitment, as they might experience with an institutional membership from some other open access publishers, or from the annual fee to a subscription journal) - they pay once and the faculty members who take advantage then have the benefit forever. From the point of view of an author both options are very 'hands off' - i.e. they don't need to do anything additional to take advantage of the payments. For option #1 - libraries simply email their selected recipients an activation code which they 'click on' to activate their plan. For option #2 - we identify qualifying faculty members and researchers as they come to publish with us using their email address, and when they go to pa, we credit them with a plan out of their pre-payment fund. Both options make it possible for libraries to provide an Open Access publication option to a large number of faculty and researchers in an extremely cost effective way. For less than the price of just one year of access to just one subscription journal, a library can provide literally hundreds of their faculty with an open access publication option, for a single one-off payment. And those plans, once purchased, are good for life, meaning that those individuals can publish with us, for free, forever! Institutions who sign up receive regular reporting; a public page on our site showcasing what was bought and how their faculty can use it; and marketing support. The institution gets 'administrator level' access to advanced analytics tools which are continually enhanced; and they get personal support. Libraries pay for plans at a discounted 'post acceptance' rate (because the post-acceptance rate guarantees that their money is being used for an actual publication). Specifically, Libraries which enter into one of these arrangements receive a $10 discount off of the standard $139 price (e.g. $129 per Basic Publication Plan instead of $139, and the same $10 discount for higher tiers). Therefore, for example, if they pre-paid $8K then that would fund as many as 62 Basic Plans ($129 x 62 = $7,998) or, a smaller number of some combination of other plans. Libraries can choose to fund only 'Basic plans'; or to fund 'Basic or Enhanced' plans, or to cover plans at 'any level'. Libraries also nominate which email addresses they want to use to identify an author as coming from their institution (e.g. anyone with *@stanford.edu in their address). We have a minimum spend of just $5K to set up one of these arrangements (which would, for example, fund a little over 38 'Basic' plans, i.e. 38 x $129 = $4902). With our low price points, this way of doing things is clearly a much better deal than paying for APC fees for every single publication (fees which can rise as high as $5,000 per publication at some journals). The end result is that for the price of a single APC fee at some other publication, a very large number of faculty can be given a lifetime publication plan at PeerJ! More information (including a list of institutions and selected case studies) can be found at: https://peerj.com/edu. If you have are interested in open access then we encourage you to put your librarian in touch via this form (https://peerj.com/edu/).