UNMC corresponding authors publishing in “Public Library of Science (PLOS) Biology” and “PLOS Medicine” will not incur article processing charges as a result of a new three-year agreement between the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and PLOS.
BTAA members now are invited to participate in PLOS’ Community Action Publishing program. The agreement ensures time to test and evaluate this new community-based model and allows BTAA researchers to publish in PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine without incurring fees. On the basis of University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s membership in BTAA, faculty at all University of Nebraska campuses will benefit from this agreement.
PLOS’ Community Action Publishing is PLOS’ effort to sustain highly selective journal publishing without article processing charges for authors.
Articles with a corresponding author affiliated with any of the University of Nebraska campuses, or a corresponding author from another PLOS Community Action Program-member institution, are eligible. If the corresponding author is not from the University of Nebraska or another member institution, but some of the coauthors are, the APC will be discounted.
“This agreement is an important step in making open access scholarly publishing accessible to more authors by supporting article processing charges,” said Emily McElroy, dean of the McGoogan Health Sciences Library. “Additionally, it demonstrates another facet to the collaboration between the University of Nebraska libraries through the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries.”
Authors must indicate their institutional affiliation when submitting their articles to PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine to ensure that the publisher’s editorial management system identifies them correctly as eligible for the publication charge waiver.
For information about the agreement, and a description of the steps involved for authors, see the Community Action Publishing section of the PLOS website. For more information, contact Heather Brown.
Please consider adding other PLOS journals to this agreement. These two journals are aspirational for virtually all manuscripts. In contrast, adding the other journals would have a much more significant impact on the cost of publishing for the UNMC campus.
Dr. Fisher, we will pass along your feedback to our colleagues at UNL who are the primary members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Based on what I have seen, PLoS is only allowing these two journals as part of this program for any library consortia. This is where we could benefit from authors asking publishers to expand their programs to include more journals.