Engineering Open Choice

Another hybrid OA journal program was announced yesterday. This one is from Professional Engineering Publishing in the UK and is called Engineering Open Choice. It's the usual sort of thing; a submission fee is paid in order for an accepted article to become openly accessible. There are a few aspects of this program worth mentioning, both good and bad:

*The fee for Engineering Open Choice is 1700 pounds, which, as of this morning, works out to $3643 CAN or $3494 CAN. Don't hold this to me but I think this is the most expensive hybrid OA submission fee, more than Springer Open Choice, which is $3000 US. On top of this hefty fee, there are also colour charges (but no other fees).

*Engineering Open Choice applies to all of the Professional Engineering Publishing journals, including the well-known Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

*Interestlingly, the publisher will guarantee that Engineering Open Choice articles will be freely available online via their website for a period of 10 years from the date of publication minimum. Unless I've missed something, this is the first time I've actually seen a specific guarantee of availability in years given by a publisher. I would hope that it would be much longer than 10 years in practice but it's good to see some sort of promise of accessibility.

*Authors who take part in Engineering Open Choice will be able to use a Creative Commons license and deposit the published version in repositories. This is good.

*Not so good is the lack of any mention of subscription price decreases in response to the take-up of Engineering Open Choice, as other publishers have indicated. Perhaps that will come later.

On that note, Oxford University Press has announced that, in response to the take up of their OA option, will apparently be reducing the subscription costs of some journals for 2008. Details are forthcoming. I'll post these to OA librarian as soon as I can after they are released.

More information about Engineering Open Choice from Professional Engineering Publishing can be found at http://www.pepublishing.com/pep/guidelines/Engineering_Open_Choice.PDF.