The recent announcement that the University of California System has canceled their multi-million dollar subscription contract with Elsevier (see here or our previous post) highlights a new Open Access publishing model termed “Read and Publish” or RAP.
RAP is just one of many new publishing models introduced in the past few years with the aim of making the results of research open and accessible. With RAP, an institution pays an annual fee to the publisher that includes both access to traditional journal content and a blanket publishing charge so that all affiliated researchers can publish without access restrictions or paywalls. The key differences between RAP and other models are:
RAP's promise is that it will substantively increase access to an institution's research as well as increase the overall pool of open access research articles. To this end, RAP has been used already in the Europe (see here or here) and here in the US by MIT (see here), but some researchers are concerned that RAP is not necessarily a good deal, citing how, amongst other things, it bolsters the huge multi-journal access packages that so many universities are moving away from; that it is not transparent to the institutions; and that it doesn’t necessarily reduce costs (see here or here). The concept is still so new, however, that it may be several years before enough data can be collected on RAP to see if it truly delivers on its promise.
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