Two publishers are trying out new ways to support open-access journals, Science reports.
It notes that the cost of open-access publishing is often shifted to researchers who pay article-processing fees. It says these fees can be thousands of dollars and may be out of reach for researchers with small budgets, but at the same time, some publishers worry that the fees won't cover costs.
According to Science, two publishers — Annual Reviews and Association for Computing Machinery — have implemented different approaches to address these issues. Annual Reviews, for instance, is pursuing an approach called Subscribe to Open in which institutions are asked to pay what they had for their previous subscription, minus a 5 percent discount, to make a journal open access. ACM, meanwhile, is asking institutions whose researchers most often publish in its journals to pay sometimes much more than they had been for their subscriptions, but in return for unlimited publishing in its journals.
Science adds that while these approaches have been viewed positively, it's unclear whether they could be adopted more widely.