From: Dmitri Zaitsev <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2019 09:46:55 +0700

Hi Leo,

I've thought this might be of help, after Peter Suber's helpful comments, I have settled on the term "no-fee OA" here: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/96

In that sense, a subscription journal not charging author is still no-fee. So no-fee is only about fee to author, separately from OA, which is only about access, while the above post only discusses "no-fee OA", which is the combination of two.

Using stones (Diamond or Platinum) is common but can also confuse people, especially "Gold OA" is extremely confusing as being used in different meanings by different people. In that vein, terms like "no-fee" feel more explicit and robust against being coerced into different meaning.

Dmitri Zaitsev
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
WWW: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~zaitsev/

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 11:12 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2019 13:37:44 +0200

What is a no-fee journal?

Spontaneously, I would have answered: an OA journal which does not charge publication fees. Further consideration might be needed, however, as DOAJ and QOAM come to different conclusions with respect to a number of journals. For example, the Elsevier journals 1873-2445 and 1873-1562 or the Springer journals 1029-8479 and 1434-6052 do not charge authors because libraries have paid the bill as members of the SCOAP3 project. But does that make these journals ‘no-fee’ as DOAJ seems to conclude, or are they just ‘discounted journals’ as QOAM claims? The outcome may have relevance to the wider Plan S debate as well.

I would appreciate if the community could shed some light on this.

Leo Waaijers