Fondren Library partners with two new publishers to decrease research publishing costs

By Josh Stallings     2/25/25 10:47pm

Fondren Library announced they reached two new agreements with the Association for Computing Machinery and the Royal Society for Chemistry in an email Feb. 11. According to the email, these agreements will expand the accessibility of Rice publications and alleviate the financial burden within Rice research. 

The agreements mean Rice-affiliated authors have six free-to-publish organizations available, and increase the number of publishers with open access agreements to 13. Open-access research is available for anyone to read without paying a fee.

Scott Vieira, head of collections and content strategy at Fondren, said these agreements come amid several years worth of change in academia where more publishers have begun offering  open-access subscription models to libraries.

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“Libraries traditionally have been paying for subscriptions that we call read access. So, we buy subscriptions to journals and other content so that users can access it,” Vieira said. “The ones that are with ACM and RSC … They call them transformative agreements … In addition to paying for access, we are also starting to pay for publishing as well.”

Researchers can publish in the RSC in either gold open-access journals, where anyone can access publications free of charge, and hybrid open-access journals where authors can choose whether their work is available through free or paid access. Fondren will now pay for publishing costs to open-access publications. 

“They call that an article processing charge … [Authors] get that type of fee to get their article essentially published open access … and the library pays … for Rice authors to be able to publish so they wouldn’t have to pay those fees with their grant money,” Vieira said. 

In 2023, the ACM’s governing body unanimously voted to transition all publications to an open-access model by the end of 2025, according to the ACM’s website. ACM universities pay an annual fee to support the cost of paper publishing, and fees increase based on the university’s publishing output. However, this change means higher prices for all currently subscribed universities. 

Vieira said that in the ACM, Rice produces a similar amount of research as institutions like Duke University whose libraries have greater endowments than Rice’s. These deals may mean an increased cost for Fondren, but Vieira said they make financial sense for the library. 

“[ACM] came to us, they gave us a five-year kind of gradual increase, so we know what the increase is going to be, and it’ll be five years until we’re paying,” Vieira said.

These deals also allow Fondren to discuss sharing the cost of publisher subscriptions with university departments, Vieira said.

“We’re still having conversations with the Computer Science department about the possibility of cost sharing … Since they’re benefiting from this, to help us be able to continue this deal, because, again, our resources are finite,” Vieira said. “There’s a lot of libraries thinking about having conversations with administration … about some of the packages that are not like ACM, that are much more interdisciplinary.” 

The agreements have been in the works for over a year, and Vieira said that recent events regarding NIH research grant cuts did not motivate them. Programs like these aim to decrease the burden on professors’ grants, even if publishing costs account for a small portion of research funds. 

“[W]ith the political situation, things could change really fast,” Vieira said. “The library has a strong position on open access. We believe strongly that research should be open, and that it benefits more people that way.”

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