Publishing Open Access Electronic Journals
Sponsoring Proposal

Organizations wishing to launch and sponsor an Open Access Electronic Journal are invited to consider the following administration and pricing scheme.

1. General

VTEX Typesetting Services (VTEX) and Mattson Publishing Services (MPS) will offer a service to facilitate publication of Journals sponsored by suitable professional organizations. Journals will be published by the union of their sponsoring organizations.

The role of a publisher might also be delegated to VTEX/MPS upon agreement.

VTEX and MPS will maintain the whole process, including LaTeX template for authors and author support. The OJS (Open Journal System) or other open source journal management system will be used for article submissions, maintaining the Peer Review process, publishing and hosting. The published articles can be posted to article repositories, such us arXiv, Euclid, etc., upon request. The published journal articles (PDF files) will contain active links, including external links to the bibliography sources, which will be handled via the Link Server. For reference, see the Probability Surveys site, maintained by VTEX. The DOI numbers will be assigned by VTEX.

All journal content will be freely readable on the web, and libraries may freely print out articles and bind into volumes if they wish.

“Print on demand” issues could be arranged upon request.

For the formal copyright arrangements we suggest to follow the Creative Commons Attribution License: for discussion see http://bibserver.berkeley.edu/proposals/atlas_proposal/proposal.html

Sponsoring organizations are expected to commit an annually renewable agreement with VTEX/MPS.

2. Administration, article submission and editorial procedures

Each sponsoring organization willing to fund publishing of an Electronic Journal is invited to appoint (endorse) one or more (no limit) Associate Editors. Associate Editors will be responsible for reviewing and accepting or declining papers. An Associate Editor may be endorsed by more than one supporting organization. Each published article will indicate the name of the Associate Editor who handled it, and the names of organizations endorsing that Associate Editor.

Each sponsoring organization nominates one of its Associate Editors as organization representative. These representatives of the supporting organizations will constitute the Management Committee of the Journal, which will appoint a Coordinating Editor. The Coordinating Editor will manage relations with sponsoring organizations, along with other responsibilities, as delegated by the Management Committee, such us checking that Associate Editors are not slow in handling papers, writing a formal annual report on the journal to sponsoring organizations, etc.

The Associate Editors will choose Reviewers, as in any peer-reviewed journal. The Reviewers will be included into the joint list of Journal Reviewers.

To the Author, the submission process is the standard process: LaTeX papers in a simple template are uploaded to the journal site. Authors are encouraged to specify a particular Associate Editor; otherwise the Coordinating Editor will assign an Associate Editor.

3. Administration of costs

After certain periods of time (once a quarter, a half year or a year – as will be negotiated with the Coordinating Editor), reports on published articles will be generated. Each article within a report will indicate the Associate Editor and the sponsoring organization.

The report will contain information which kind of charges are applicable to every article, according to the pricing scheme. The total costs could be distributed among the sponsoring organizations on the basis of reports.

4. Pricing scheme

There are three types of charges.

• 4.1. The annual fee of $3,000 per journal title for maintaining the peer review process, publishing, hosting, archiving, maintenance, and author support. For small journals, having up to 25 annually published articles, the annual fee is reduced to $2,000. For electronic journals having up to 50 annual publications – $2,500.
• 4.2. The per page fee applicable to articles which needed the human intervention:
  • 4.2.1. When adjustments are needed in order to compose an article, or if authors do not use the suggested LaTeX template, or cross-references needed to be inserted or any other adjustments (e.g., correcting graphics) are necessary – the fee is $4.30 per page of an article.
  • 4.2.2. Inserting final corrections requested by authors/editors – $1.25 per page of an article.
• 4.3. Per article charges applicable to articles requested to post to arXiv, Euclid, or similar repositories:
  • 4.3.1. Posting to arXiv – $37.80 per article;
  • 4.3.2. Posting to Euclid – $14.70 per article;
  • 4.3.3. Alerting authors about their published articles and posting to arXiv, also providing the corresponding links – $5.20 per article.

The low per-paper cost assumes authors are diligent in preparing papers with the designated style files so they can be processed automatically.

Extra charges indicated in 4.2 are for human intervention. Organizations should advise Associate Editors on whether the organization will or will not pay such extra charges; if not, Associate Editors must inform authors that the proper format is mandatory.