Editorial-Publication Charges

NAR's full open access initiative is now in its fourth year. There is no question that during this period the greatest challenge has been to set author charges that are within the reach of authors' hard-won funding, yet financially sustainable for the journal. This is a continued topic of discussion for NAR's editors and publishers. We are certainly aware that NAR authors have other choices when considering where to publish their work, and so it is important that we make NAR attractive to authors when they are making this important decision. COST There are many parameters to consider when deciding where to publish a piece of work, and cost is probably one of them for many authors. While referred to as 'open access charges', the NAR charges (Table 1) actually cover a range of publication costs, which are often charged for separately by other journals. For example, NAR does not apply additional submission fees, page charges for up to nine pages, colour or supplementary data charges, or charges for depositing in NIH or supplying a PDF version of the published article to authors. A recent review of other journals in this field suggests that the total costs of publishing may not always be dissimilar to publishing in NAR. For example, if you were to publish an eight-page article with two colour figures, two half-tone figures and supplementary material in NAR in 2008, and were not eligible for a discounted rate, the total author charge would be USD 2670. If you were to publish the same article in PNAS, selecting the open access option as a non-member (at a rate of USD 1200), the total author charge would be in the region of USD 2600. Publishing the same paper under the JBC optional open access model would cost approximately USD 2800 as an ASBMB member and USD 3300 for non-ASBMB members. Publishing the paper under The EMBO Journal's open access option would cost approximately USD 4300 when all charges are factored in (Table 2). Of course, authors can choose not to pay the open access charge for the above journals and publish under the normal subscription-based model instead, although for an increasing number of authors this decision may be strongly influenced by their funding bodies or institutions. The open access element of NAR's publication charge is mandatory, the choice we made when we adopted this alternative business model in 2005. In …