The Hybrids Continue: ALPSP Open Choice

I'm a little late on this and it has been blogged elsewhere but I thought I should at least mention the latest entry into the hybrid journal pool, "Open Choice" from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Beginning with the July 2007 issue, authors of articles in the ALPSP journal Learned Publishing will be able to make their accepted articles openly accessible with a submission fee $2500 US for members and $3000 for non-members.

Some notes:

*This is being run as a trial for 12 months, "to see if it provides a viable way of sustaining the costs of peer review, editing and other aspects of journal publication". They will also look at amending subscription costs after the year is up, a good thing, IMHO.

*The fees are at the high end of the hybrid spectrum. The $3000 non-member fee matches that of Springer's hybrid program, which is at or near the top. My gut feeling is that this might be too pricey for the average Learned Publishing author but I could be wrong.

*The ALPSP does permit all Learned Publishing articles to become freely accessible after a year so the addition of the OA option for the current year means that at least some of the journals will be OA regardless of date of publication.