Open Access Pricing Structure for the JASHS and HortScience

Open Access Pricing Structure for the Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science and HortScience

In my column in the ASHS E-news for May, I announced that the ASHS Board of Directors had approved moving the Journal and HortScience to Open Access publication (OA) effective January 1, 2020. In President Cole’s “Reflections” column in June, she elaborated on the status of our current publication policies and reasons why the move to OA has become critical to our society’s future. In brief, our current publication model has depended heavily on personal and organizational subscription fees to subsidize author publishing fees in order to cover the review, editorial, and production costs to our society. This has worked well in the past. However, beginning about 10 years ago, the number of both personal and organizational subscriptions started to decrease. In the past five years the rate of the decrease in these subscriptions has accelerated. As discussed earlier, it became apparent that these subscriptions would soon decrease to a level that would no longer supplement author publishing fees. Thus, forcing an adjustment in author publishing fees. Coupled with this was a world-wide move toward open access. In previous columns I have discussed the many advantages of OA to authors and their institutions.

In my May article I also announced that I would introduce the new pricing structure in a forthcoming article. At the spring board meeting the ASHS Board of Directors voted to approve the following new charges for manuscripts in the Journal of ASHS and HortScience.

The flat fee to publish in HortScience will be $2000 for members and $3000 for non-members. The price for 1- to 2-page manuscripts will be $750 for members and $1000 for non-members. The flat fee to publish in the JASHS will be $2500 for members and $3500 for non-members. With this pricing structure page counts will not be restricted, and complimentary author alterations and color images/graphs/tables will be allowed. These costs are lower than the majority of OA fees currently charged by other professional societies and other non-society based journals in plant science-related fields. Fees for most OA journals range from $1300 to $3500, with the majority being in the higher range.

OA offers many benefits to authors, as I have discussed in earlier columns. Among these benefits are: 1) Immediate distribution of the author’s work, 2) A much broader audience (which often increases citations of the work), and 3) Their work is available to many people worldwide who would not see or benefit from it if it is kept behind a firewall. Adapting to the rapidly changing world of scientific publication requires ASHS to move to OA, but it also positions ASHS to be a leader among agricultural research societies in adapting the benefits of OA. It will also ensure that ASHS will remain the leading source of peer-reviewed specialty crop research, teaching and outreach information in a modern publishing environment with many non-society-based journals.

I encourage all ASHS members who have an administrative position to work to support OA by seeking ways to assist with OA fees for their research, education, and outreach faculty in the transition period. I also encourage all of our members to include OA publication fees in their grant and contract proposals. President Cole and I have both discussed in earlier columns that many federal agencies and non-government organizations already encourage and support OA and, in fact, already require OA publishing or have plans to require it in the near future.

I welcome and seek input on the content of this column. Please feel free to contact me at carlsams@utk.edu; or, reply to the discussion link in this column.

Carl Sams

Chairman of the Board of ASHS