[LINK] Open access publishing not a threat to research grants

[Glen Turner]

Tom Worthington wrote:

> Perhaps some indicator is needed to show those articles for which
> authors have paid to have published. These can then be discounted buy
> the reader (and excluded from reputable lists of published research).
> Unfortunately Australian universities have been encouraging such vanity
> publishing by their own university presses.

IEEE and ACM publications usually ask for money. This is done
separately from the paper committee and your paper is published
regardless.  So 'paid to be published' isn't straight-forward to
identify.

What you are seeing here is a bunfight between the ARC and
the universities about if open access publishing is part
of the 'infrastructure' (and thus not funded by ARC grants)
or not.  The ARC are on the back foot because they currently
fund 'paper charges' such as the one's I described above.

DEST require a archive of publications for the Research
Quality Framework, and it has partly funded this. But there
is no requirement that the archive be leveraged into
open access publishing.

Colin is quite right about the current system being very
expensive. The ARC doesn't see that as it is mainly paid
for by libraries. The ARC's argument is basically is more
of the cost of publication moves to 'paper charges' then
the ARC will expect a transfer of funding from libraries
to the ARC. I suspect it will be a cold day in hell before
the libraries, which have had their budgets slashed for
twenty years now and can barely afford to replace wobbly
chairs, willingly give up any funding.