Cornell University
Columbia University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Simon Fraser University
Universitat de Barcelona
University of Calgary
University of California at Berkeley
University of Michigan
University of Ottawa
Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity
“Publishers and researchers know that it has never been easier to share the best work they produce with the world. But they also know that their traditional business model is creating new walls around discoveries. Universities can really help take down these walls, and the open-access compact is a highly significant tool for the job.”
Thomas C. Leonard
University Librarian, UC Berkeley
COPE, The Compact for Open-access Publishing Equity, supports equity of the business models by committing each university to “the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”
On September 14, 2009, Harvard joined Cornell, Dartmouth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley, in formalizing a commitment to open-access publication.
Open-access journals make their articles available freely to anyone, while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals, such as management of the peer-review process, filtering, production, and distribution.
Since open-access journals do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources, including subventions, in-kind support, or, in a sizable minority of cases, processing fees paid by or on behalf of authors for submission to or publication in the journal.
Universities subsidize the costs of subscription journals by subscribing to them. Universities and funding agencies can provide equitable support for the processing-fee business model for open-access journals — to place the subscription-fee and processing-fee models on a more level playing field — by subsidizing processing fees as well.
The Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity (HOPE) fund is Harvard’s implementation of the Compact. HOPE provides funds to Harvard authors to reimburse processing fees for articles published in open-access journals.
