[ASA] Changes to MNRAS publication fees

[Stas Shabala]

Dear ASA members,

Many of you are already aware of changes associated with publication in MNRAS. From 1 Jan 2025, publishing in MNRAS will attract an Article Processing Charge (APC). Our community publishes a substantial fraction of its work in MNRAS, so this is a significant change. The reason for this change is the recent failure in negotiations between Oxford University Press (the publisher of MNRAS) and CAUL (the Council of Australian University Libraries) to include Gold Open Access to MNRAS in the new OUP – CAUL deal.

I am presently trying to get more details from CAUL, specifically relating to the timeframes for this arrangement and how it was arrived at. However, it seems certain that for 2025 at least (and likely beyond) publishing in MNRAS will come with a financial cost to the authors.

MNRAS have indicated that waivers can be requested by authors. Many of you have already received emails from MNRAS stating that a waiver will automatically be granted to papers which are currently going through review at MNRAS. For new papers, whether or not a waiver is granted will be decided at the time of submission; in other words authors will know straight away whether they will need to pay an APC when their article is accepted – and presumably have the option of withdrawing their paper at this early stage if APCs are required.

Cambridge University Press (the publisher of PASA) have confirmed to ASA Council that PASA is included in the 2025 CAUL – CUP transformative agreement deal. This means that publication in PASA should remain free for authors at CAUL-affiliated institutions (which covers the bulk of the Australian astronomy community), at least for 2025. If any community members are definitively aware of other free-to-publish options (e.g. through conversations with their university libraries), I would welcome this information.

I will be in touch again if I have any updates or important clarifications on this situation.

Best wishes,

Stas

------------------------------------
Professor Stas Shabala
(he/him/his)
President, Astronomical Society of Australia
Discipline of Physics | School of Natural Sciences | College of Science and Engineering
University of Tasmania
------------------------------------


This email is confidential, and is for the intended recipient only. Access, disclosure, copying, distribution, or reliance on any of it by anyone outside the intended recipient organisation is prohibited and may be a criminal offence. Please delete if obtained in error and email confirmation to the sender. The views expressed in this email are not necessarily the views of the University of Tasmania, unless clearly intended otherwise.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.sydney.edu.au/pipermail/asa/attachments/20241123/2c8e69c1/attachment.htm>