USAIN/CBHL 2024 Biennial Meeting

Using PubAg to Share USDA-funded Work
Maggie Foust (USDA - National Agricultural Library)
Stephanie Ritchie (USDA - National Agricultural Library)

The United States Office of Science and Technology Policy has released two memos providing guidelines on public access awareness and compliance. This informational presentation on Departmental Regulation (DR) 1020-006, involving public access to scholarly publication and digital scientific research data assets, will provide details on how to meet the requirement to submit final, peer-reviewed, accepted manuscripts to PubAg, the USDA public access archive system, and create catalog records for datasets in Ag Data Commons.

This presentation will be of interest to all librarians who assist awardees and contractors who are engaged in USDA-supported scientific research. DR 1020-006 makes all peer-reviewed, scholarly publications and digital scientific research data assets arising from unclassified scientific research, supported wholly or in part by the USDA, accessible to the public to the extent practicable. DR 1020-006 applies to NIFA grant awards, cooperative agreements and contracts having started on or after October 1, 2022.

What Will You Pay? Investigating the Impact of APC Discounts
Suzanne Stapleton (University of Florida)
Laura Spears (University of Florida)

Open Access (OA) publishing makes scholarly research free to read, thus helping global researchers grow together. To support Open Access (OA) publishing, the University of Florida (UF) entered into a Gold OA Pilot agreement with Elsevier in 2020. Article Processing Charges (APC) discounts of 10-15% are available to UF authors who choose to publish their work as OA articles in eligible Elsevier OA or hybrid journals. Librarians at UF used this opportunity to better understand researcher publishing behavior. Surveys of authors who published OA or behind a paywall (Subscription) were distributed 11 times between January 2021 and January 2023. A total of 203 surveys were completed, 80% from Subscription authors and 20% from OA authors. Two focus groups were conducted in 2022 to explore researchers’ publishing decisions with qualitative methods. Results illuminate researchers’ familiarity with OA publishing and the complexity of factors that impact their publishing behaviors. Most respondents had previously published two or more OA articles. Factors influencing their decision whether to publish OA include fee amounts and availability of funds, target audience, and philosophy. Although 56% of survey respondents indicated that the amount of the APC discount influenced their decision whether to publish OA, no statistically significant correlation was found between the amount of the listed APC and the authors’ statement of the influence of the APC discount. From July 2020 through February 2023, APC discounts in this pilot reduced author expenses by nearly $64,000, an average of $1,560 per article yet the majority of authors elected not to publish their eligible articles as OA. Overall, this research exemplifies the challenges with current OA publishing where APC levels restrict sharing new knowledge with the global research community. Proposed new public access compliance mandates in the U.S. offer additional opportunities for researchers to disseminate their work widely.