[ASA] PASA, ARC and open access

[Bryan Gaensler]

Hi again everyone,

A few people have written to me asking what the ARC's new policy on open access publication means for PASA papers published by Cambridge University Press (CUP). The bottom line is that it will be trivially easy to publish papers in PASA (and in most other journals) while adhering to the ARC's new requirements. 

Here is a brief summary:


* The ARC's new open access policy came into force on 1 Jan 2013, as described at http://www.arc.gov.au/applicants/open_access.htm . Publications that meet the criteria described in this policy must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within 12 months from the date of publication.


* If you publish a paper in PASA that falls under the ARC's open access policy, there are four different ways you can meet the ARC's requirements:

  1. You can post the accepted version of your paper on arXiv.org (which most of you probably do anyway). Your institutional repository then need only host the article metadata, with a link to the paper on arXiv.

  2. You can submit the accepted version of your paper to your institutional repository. Note that the accepted version of your paper is NOT the same as the published version of your paper. The former is the manuscript you submit to the journal and which many authors will also choose to post to arXiv.org (e.g. a PDF file generated by you from a LaTeX template); the latter is the typeset version published by the journal.

  3. You can have your PASA paper published by CUP as open access by paying an article processing fee (this means the paper will be freely available to anyone, regardless of whether they have a subscription to PASA). For 2013, this fee is US$2700. You can then choose whether to submit the published version of the paper to your institutional repository, or to have the repository host only the article metadata plus a link to the paper on the CUP WWW site.

  4. As Editor-in-Chief, I get to designate an additional six PASA papers per year as open access without any article processing fee. If you submit an awesome paper to PASA, I may designate it as open access. You can then choose whether to submit the published version of the paper to your institutional repository, or to have the repository host only the article metadata plus a link to the paper on the CUP WWW site.


* When you publish in PASA, CUP will supply you free-of-charge with a PDF version of the published typeset paper. However, unless your paper is published as open access, the copyright agreement that you sign has restrictions on the use of this PDF file:

- You can post the PDF file on your personal or departmental WWW site, to be freely downloaded.
- You can make hard copies of the PDF for use by you and your students.
- You CANNOT submit the PDF file to an institutional repository or link to it from such a repository until 12 months have elapsed. After that time, you can replace the preprint from options (1) or (2) above with the published PDF file if you wish.

Please let me know if you have any questions as we move into this brave new ARC-mandated era.

regards,

Bryan Gaensler
Editor-in-Chief, PASA