I was on the bus from London South Bank University this morning, headed to University College London when good news arrived, shining through an otherwise cold and rainy day. The Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Engineering Education  (EJEE), Dr. Kristina Edström, forwarded me an email from the publishing house, Taylor and Francis, regarding costs for purchasing “Gold” level open access in the journal.

 

The change will enable SEFI members to save $500 off the cost of Gold access and the publishers will implement a change tonight–when they reboot their system. Information about the discount will then be included on the T&F web page for EJEE (although the T&F code for the journal is actually CEEE). Info about how to secure the discount will also be provided by the EJEE editors (Kristina, along with her deputy editors, Dr. Maartje van den Bogaard and Prof. Jonte Bernhard) when they send the formal acceptance email to authors.

SEFI–the European Society for Engineering Education—is the organising body behind EJEE. There are individual memberships available, but it’s more typical for an institution to join. Because I am affiliated with UCL and TU Dublin, which are both SEFI members, I am also a member of SEFI. There’s a full list of member organisation on the SEFI website.

Here’s what the publishers’ rep said:

Hi Kristina,

I hope that you are very well today.

I’m just picking up on your email to Rachel regarding the discounted APC for SEFI members and promoting this a bit more widely. I have added this information to the Instructions for Authors page under the Open Access heading, and to the Society Information page as below:

• IFAs:
• Society Information

These changes to the journal pages will go live overnight once our servers update. Do let me know if any tweaks to the wording are required. If it doesn’t appear already, it might be something worth advertising also somewhere on the SEFI website—do let me know if you would like T&F’s help with this.

For your reference, the relevant clause in the contract regarding this APC discount for SEFI members is screenshotted below:

Please do not hesitate to get back in touch if there’s anything else I can help with.

All best wishes,
Jess

I’m glad I was able to help push this along, so SEFI members can realise savings. I stuck with this effort, first as a curious author, and second as a member of EJEE’s Editorial Board. I’m feeling today like I added a bit of value to the SEFI community.

Kristina celebrated with a Tweet letting the world know:

As for my own article (the one I blogged about yesterday) I haven’t decided if I’ll upgrade to Gold. I’ve discovered there’s a 12-month embargo for the current access level I have (Green), and after 12 months I can post the official version of the paper. Perhaps the 50 free copies I’m allowed to give out will suffice until then, since most colleagues will have access to the article via their university libraries.

The full cost to obtain Gold access for my paper would be about €2395, according to an estimate I received from the platform a couple weeks ago. The $500 discount equates to €446, so the total cost for open access would still be head-spinning, at about €1950.

Yes, it’s true. Many people don’t know that authors typically must pay to publish their writing in top-notch journals. Fortunately, with EJEE, there’s no cost to authors if they go the Green route. However, for Gold (fully and immediately open) access to the public, there is a charge.

EJEE is pretty special in regard to offering Green access for free. The other top journals in the field of engineering education research (EER) charge. For the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), organised by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), it costs the author around $60 per page to publish (and there isn’t a free route other than requesting a special exception for extenuating circumstances). I hope I can figure out how to pay the fee when I get an article accepted there.

Today, I’m celebrating small victories.