Yesterday I was made aware of a situation where a University of Canterbury author attempted to submit their article for publication to OUP (open access) under our read and publish agreement.

The email the academic received as part of the submissions process contained mixed messages which included telling them that they needed to ask the University of Canterbury to pay for their APC and to confirm that they will pay the APC charge.  The academic interpreted this to mean they would have to wait for our quarterly open access fund meeting for funds to be approved and gave up at that point.

This of course is not correct as under the read and publish agreements APCs are waived, assuming authors meet the publishers criteria for article acceptance and assuming the CAUL agreements haven’t met any caps (which they haven’t to date).

I am following this up with OUP and CAUL.  CAUL replied to me:

“I share your frustration after having given OUP much feedback about their interfaces and communication.   Their new platform will commence in August, hopefully that will make the arrangements more apparent to authors”

CAUL has asked OUP to use the same text on the CAUL libguide in their emails from now on (scroll to view “How to submit your article for open access publishing”).  I will update when I have more news on this and a reply from OUP.

Tim Stedman