Recognition that non-science academics often lacked specific research funding led the California-based commercial publisher to launch Sage Open with an article fee of just $695, compared with PLoS ONE's $1,350 - and $5,000 at Elsevier's Cell titles. Sage Open has so far received more than 1,400 manuscripts, and published more than 160 articles. However, a recent survey of authors indicated that more than 70 per cent of Sage Open's accepted authors had paid the article fee out of their own pocket, while only 15 per cent of all articles published in 2012 across Sage's fleet of humanities and social sciences journals derived from research projects with allocated funding.
Alain Marois on 02 Feb 12In 2010, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library agreed to take part in a global study of Elsevier electronic books (ebooks) sponsored by Elsevier Publishing. Ultimately, 129 UIUC faculty and graduate students participated in a logbook study that examined the ebook discovery process, detailed the way in which this group of researchers used ebooks, and queried users on the value they assigned to Elsevier ebooks. Going beyond the Elsevier survey, this study examines the value of ebooks both to UIUC users and to libraries, and it reports on an assessment of the ebook collection at UIUC including cost and use statistics. The results show that UIUC users assigned a high value to Elsevier ebooks for research purposes; this paper also determines that, in the broadest sense and as a collective format, ebooks offer libraries a better economic value than print books (pbooks) when comparing the cost of activities such as processing, circulation, storage and preservation.