8.1 From Subscription to Fair Open Access: A Roadmap

Open Access publishing is often said to be the future of academic journals, but the actual move from a subscription model to an Open Access model is not easily achieved. Fair Open Access provides a model for flipping subscription journals to Open Access. This model has three main features:

1. It is discipline-based: within each academic discipline, a foundation is established that helps flipping journals from subscription to Open Access. Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA, www.lingoa.eu) is an example of such a foundation. Existing networks within the discipline are exploited to influence editors to flip their journal to OA. In linguistics, three international journals have moved from their traditional publisher to a new open access publisher, moving their entire editorial staff, authors, and peer reviewers from the traditional subscription model to Fair Open Access.
2. There are no author-facing charges. Article Processing Charges (APCs) for articles published in the flipped journals are paid by a five-year temporary fund established by the foundation. The foundation pays for APCs during the transition from subscription to Open Access, and also covers any legal costs and advice associated with flipping the journals. APCs are kept as low as possible, and ownership of the journal lies with the editors of a learned society.
3. Long-term sustainability. After five years, journals join a multi-disciplinary broader association such as the Open Library of Humanities (OLH www.openlibhums.org), which pays for APCs through its worldwide consortium of more than 200 contributing libraries. These libraries pay an annual sum for the APCs of flipped journals. The libraries also have a say in which journals are admitted to the OLH. As a result, they can abandon the subscriptions for the journals that have flipped and pay much lower APC-contributions to OLH instead. In this way, the flip from subscription to Fair Open Access comes full circle.

Saskia C. J. de Vries became an academic publisher with Kluwer in the 1980s after a short period of teaching Dutch Language and Literature. In 1992, the Board of the University of Amsterdam asked her to start up Amsterdam University Press, and she was its first Director. Over the twenty years of her directorship, Amsterdam University Press grew into an international, academic publisher with 20 employees in 2012, who were responsible for the approximately 200 books and 9 academic journals a year, 60 % of them in English, that were published. In 2006 she was co-founder of Leiden University Press, which has functioned as part of the University of Leiden since 2009. From 2008 till 2011, Amsterdam University Press was coordinator of the EU project Open Access Publishing in European Networks. Thanks to this project, AUP grew into one of the most innovative university presses in the world giving high priority to Open Access publishing.  As business models in the academic publishing world are changing, and since there seems to be a vast need within academia to explore new ways of disseminating academic research results funded with public money, she started her own business in 2012: Sampan – Academia & Publishing. She works with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Centre of Science and Technology (CWTS) and the Library at the University of Leiden, the Radboud University of Nijmegen (amongst other subjects also for OpenAIRE), and three other Universities of Applied Sciences. She is Project Leader of Linguistics in Open Access: www.lingOA.eu.