SAGE Reduces Processing Fee For Open Access Journal

SAGE has significantly lowered the processing fee it charges to scholars who submit papers to its open access journal, SAGE Open. SAGE Open, which launched in May 2011, is a peer-reviewed open access publication for the humanities and social and behavioral sciences. Since its founding, SAGE Open has received more than 1,400 manuscripts and published more than 160 of them. Until today, the standard processing fee for a manuscript was $695, though an introductory rate of $395 was in effect as of yesterday. Now, the fee will be reduced to $99 per manuscript.

According to SAGE, the move was predicated in part on the financial realities of academic publishing, which have placed the burden of expenses such as manuscript processing fees on faculty. A survey of published authors found that 70 percent of them had to pay the processing fee out of pocket. SAGE also reported, "Author declarations further show that less than 15 percent of all articles published across SAGE's Humanities and Social Sciences portfolio in 2012 had allocated funding."...