[ASA] PASA considering flipping to Open Access: soliciting ASA member feedback

[Ivo Seitenzahl]

Dear members of the ASA,

The astronomy/astrophysics publishing environment is currently undergoing rapid changes. Many prominent journals already have or will soon become open access journals, including not only all AAS journals (ApJ, ApJL, AJ, ApJS, PSJ) but also A&A and from 2024 MNRAS and MNRAS Letters. The advantages of open access are obvious, no more pay-walls and many studies find that open access leads to increased readership and more citations.

The ASA council and the PASA editorial board are considering turning PASA (published by Cambridge University Press, CUP) into an open access journal. This would mean the end of revenue from traditional read-subscription fees from libraries. Instead, an article publication charge (APC) would be introduced. For scientists at the vast majority of Australian universities/institutes PASA would effectively remain free to publish, however, since most institutes have signed up to a read-and-publish agreement between CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians) and CUP. If the lead author has their primary affiliation at an institute covered by the agreement, then no APCs are due. However, that said, there are 2 universities that opted out of the CAUL-CUP deal. They are UNSW and ANU. If PASA were to flip to open access and unless the agreements change, then lead authors from UNSW or ANU would have to pay an APC (estimated at about GBP 2190 ~ AUD 4100).

For further context, it is important to understand that the income generated by PASA does not scale linearly with volume of publications. If PASA remained a free to publish journal (in part) funded by traditional library subscription fees, then we can potentially expect a sharp increase in submissions, since PASA will be the only freely accessible Q1 astronomy journal. Unlike the major astronomy journals, PASA does not have full-time editors, and we may not be able to easily scale up in size significantly. Moreover, if we experienced a sharp increase in submissions, we would need to scale up the number of editors accordingly. Such a scenario would increase our costs, whereas because of fixed costs associated with running the journal, the income would remain relatively flat in comparison. PASA is a Journal owned by your Society. It exists to serve our community.

Hence we are very much interested to hear how the community feels about this topic and we solicit your feedback, which can be signed or anonymous, as you prefer. Please submit your feedback on the form linked below:

https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/ETYaCxngwOfLKRYRPH86PPE?domain=docs.google.com


Dr Ivo R Seitenzahl (he/his/him)
Senior Lecturer
UNSW Canberra, School of Science
Editor-in-Chief for PASA
Australia

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