Partnering with JMIR Publications: Transform to Open Science
As a founding member of OASPA, and a born-digital Open Access publisher since 1999, JMIR Publications has been committed to collaborating with various stakeholders across the science community in order to make Open Access the predominant model for scholarly communications, and to help institutions to help their faculty and students to communicate scientific plans and results throughout the scientific process in an open manner.
JMIR Publications is committed to supporting and changing the landscape of science to ensure that Open Access publishing can be accessible to all and that the frontiers of Open Science are extended to realize the full potential of transparent, collaborative, rigorous, and rapidly shared and discoverable research.
JMIR Publications employs different partnership models that aim to meet the needs of institutions and funders that are looking to support Open Access publishing and Open Science principles more broadly for their research community.
Below, we offer an overview of three distinct models we currently support - our cost-sharing model and our new Plan P model (https://planp.science/)- as well as a summary of our participation in the OA Switchboard initiative. Each of these models and activities aims to reduce administrative overhead for libraries, institutions, and funders; increase authors’ productivity by reducing, if not eliminating, time spent administering payments themselves; solve for the economic burden by supporting cost-sharing approaches among institutions, funders, authors, and publishers; and actively support institutions as they encourage and promote the broad range of Open Science principles across the research journey, from protocols to preprints to data-sharing to publication and more.
In the interest of making progress on all of these fronts, we remain open to other options and models and welcome the opportunity to learn from our institutional partners about terms that better meet their needs during this dynamic transition.
Institutional Memberships with Multipayer Cost-Sharing
JMIR Publications offers institutional memberships that employ a multi-payer cost-sharing model. The multi-payer model makes sure that Open Access costs are divided between institutions and funders, with libraries funding a baseline of $1,000, and additional costs are recovered from the research funders, if grant funding is available.
This model was launched with the University of California (California Digital Library - CDL) and JMIR Publications is proud to be the first publisher with which CDL made this kind of agreement. Under the agreement with CDL, all articles accepted or submitted during the term of the agreement have the first $1,000 automatically paid by the UC libraries, if the corresponding author (faculty or student) is from one of the participating UC campuses.
Billing is made directly to the UC libraries, so no author payment is needed for amounts less than $1,000. Several JMIR Publications journals charge an APF at or below $1,000. Therefore, publication in these journals is essentially free of charge for UC authors.
For other journals, if the APF exceeds $1000, full coverage for the APF is available for UC authors who have no external grant funding.
In essence, then, UC Libraries provide UC authors with funding support to help cover those fees, including:
- Partial coverage of the APF for UC authors who have access to grant funding
- Full coverage of the APF for UC authors who do not have access to grant funding
The goal of this cost-sharing model is to leverage available funds and help as many authors as possible, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for authors who wish to publish in JMIR’s open access journals.
This model is usually combined with the quarterly invoicing model (see below), which results in further cost-savings and even allows the institution to build up an open access fund earmarked for JMIR authors.
For more details regarding institutional memberships, please contact us at partnerships@jmir.org
Institutional Memberships with Quarterly Invoicing
Institutional memberships (with libraries, library consortia or funders) can be set up where part of the APF is directly billed on a quarterly basis. Cost-savings of up to 7% are possible, and we can assist to build an institutional open access fund earmarked for JMIR authors who do not have grant funding.
For more details regarding quarterly bulk invoicing, please contact us at partnerships@jmir.org
Plan P Model
Plan P (https://planp.science/) is JMIR Publications’ framework for institutions and funders to facilitate the transformation towards Open Access and Open Science. P stands for "Preprints - Peer-Review & Publication". It too is a multipayer agreement, where libraries subsidize published articles with approximately $1,000 per published article, though the invoicing is "per peer-review". Authors benefit from a $1000 APC discount if the paper ends up being published in another gold OA journal.
Plan P is an innovative new institutional membership model designed to support institutions in promoting and advancing open science principles across the researcher’s journey by
- encouraging preprinting
- encouraging research protocols, registered reports, and preprints
- offering rigorous peer review of preprints along with multiple options for the peer review process, including open peer review and cutting-edge technology
- supporting a rapid publication model of the preprint with peer review reports and related revisions in JMIRx, a new series of overlay journals, or in other journals participating in a "manuscript marketplace"
- simultaneously supporting gold open access should the author wish to submit to an open access journal of their choice as well as green open access via delivering the manuscript “package” (preprint + peer review + copyedited and designed revision) to the institutional repository of the author’s choice
- monitoring and supporting alternative and new open science metrics that seek to alter the current system’s outdated incentive drivers
In short, institutions participating in Plan P
- “subscribe” to Peer review services for corresponding authors of their institution;
- significantly reduce, and in most instances, eliminate, publication costs for corresponding authors when publishing their preprint with peer reviews in JMIRx; and
- significantly reduce publication costs for corresponding authors at all other JMIR journals as well as participating publishers’ journals via a manuscript marketplace platform
…thereby ensuring that all authors have equal access to rigorous and rapid peer review and a choice of various publication pathways, regardless of individual funding resources.
Plan P caps the contribution towards publishing costs for libraries and institutions to only US$1000 per published article.
For more details regarding Plan P, please see https://planp.science/ or contact us at partnerships@jmir.org
Participation in the OA Switchboard
All institutional memberships include optional eligibility querying and reporting through the OA Switchboard.
JMIR Publications is an active, first-mover with the OA Switchboard initiative, which also aims to level the playing field for Open Access constituents, whether institutions, funders, authors, or publishers, and reduce the administrative burden on the system to transform to this model.
At present, JMIR Publications is actively piloting the use of the OA Switchboard in partnership with institutions looking to leverage and make more visible and transparent central OA funds in support of researchers who have published and would like to continue to publish with us as a leading publisher in digital health and related fields. We welcome the opportunity to engage with institutions, funders, and consortia and will work with you to devise an automated process that facilitates a rapid publication process for your researchers.
If you are interested in learning more about the OA Switchboard initiative, please contact us at partnerships@jmir.org
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