The University of California Press will be launching a new open access journal that has a very interesting publication funding model. The journal will have a reasonable article processing charge (APC) of about $875. Of that, $250 will go into a pool that will pay editors and reviewers who work for the journal. Editors and reviewers collect points for making decisions on articles that are submitted to the journal. Payments are based on the total number of points for a given month. For example: if the activity on the journal generated 100 points for the month and you as a reviewer were responsible for 10 of those points, you would get 10% of the APC pool. You would then have an option to keep that money, or pay it forward to an OA fund at your institution or to a fund that future authors in that journal could use to pay their APCs. This will definitely be something to follow!
Here’s an interview with Neil Christensen, Director of Digital Development at UC Press, in which he explains the model in detail.
