Future Access is an extremely pragmatic publishing model designed by 'PROPAKnowledge', which redefines the narrative of Open-Access Publishing model. The intrinsic nature of Future Access Publishing model is to transcending the very limitations of Open-Access Publishing by synthesizing the fundamental objective of publishing & disseminating high quality scientific knowledge and being compassionately sensible towards some of the pressing real world issues in the society.
Future Access means sharing authentic scientific knowledge, along with an unspoken core humane responsibility of making this world a better place for the future generations...!
At an empirical level, the concept of Future Access is aimed towards creating a sense of fulfilment to our authors by ensuring that their extensively valuable work would reach the maximum number of audience from across the globe. We deploy advanced web optimizing technologies and search algorithms on each and every manuscript we publish online for an extensive global reach. Future Access is a more reliable and cost effective publishing model which functions as a much powerful virtual environment, where one could be able to address various social & environmental issues at a global scale alongside of an assured global exposure to their work. It would perfectly fit for the purpose of publishing, disseminating scientific knowledge with an added social consciousness.
Future Access is undoubtedly the more reliable and cost effective publishing model. It could be the most powerful force which could create a bigger leverage for changing the world. The leverage in a way that supports the scientific community in much better way and at the same time helps in addressing some of the pressing social issues.
To know how Future Access works, Please go through with our APC structure.
If we go through the history of publishing industry from the prelude to the current trend, it’s been continuously evolving by the times with the support of technological advancements (from Print to digital). Like as in it took roughly 10,000 years to go writing to printing press, but it took only about 500 years to get to digital. Publishers have been following different publishing models and most them were certainly pure business models or for profit models. Electronic/ digital publishing has been playing a vital role in disseminating scientific knowledge and information to the global audience ever since the internet have emerged.
There are some large publishing houses operating since few centuries were still following subscription method from the beginning. In this model the readers have to pay the prescribed amount of subscription fee to get access to the content.
Because of the pay-wall restrictions, this model remains causing complexity in making the data available to each and everyone. These pay-wall restrictions has been resulting in most of the institutions and individual readers from lower economic regions has no access to many journals, as they could not afford subscription fees.
Later on the Open-Access publishing has evolved and became a greater solution for eliminating the complexities in the traditional/ subscription method of publishing. It has been serving the scientific community in breaking down all the barriers and to reach the wider range of audience around the world. The term OA Publishing is defined and designed in such a way to make it easy for everyone in the world to get free access to the content of science and technology based on individual’s interest. The sole purpose of Open-Access Publishing is to assist the researchers and academicians in making their work freely available to everyone in the world.
But, today we all know that however the whole sector and its environment have been turned into a large scale business sector; the benefits of OA publishing is confined to those who can afford the APC.
If we go through the numbers, studies show that there is an extensive growth in both the number of STM journals and as well as the articles being published per year. And, the financial reports of some so called largest publishers were showing their annual revenue estimates in some multi-billion $USD.
According to Scientific Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and STM report 2018; the total number of scientific and technical journal articles published in 2016 are 22, 96,271 articles (nearly 2.3 million). This number includes a total of 197 countries, where as the top 10 countries in the list have published 15, 03,408 articles (more than 1.5 million).
As per the STM report 2018, there is a steady growth in the number of journals and as well as the number of articles published each year (3-3.5%). The annual revenue generated by the STM journals (Approx. 43,500 STM journals, which includes 9400 non-English-language journals) estimates $10bn USD for the year of 2017.
Currently the average cost of publishing and distribution per each article was approximately USD $1800 to USD $2000. Every publisher in the market had a different APC structure ranging from $199(USD) to $2,348(USD). Mostly the journals operating by big names in the market was charging on an average minimum of $1150(USD) to maximum of $3300(USD) as Article Processing Charges (APC).
If we combine this with the total number of articles published in the year 2017, at an average cost of $2000 per article published; the total cost would be nearly $6.2bn USD had been spent by the scientific community (which includes Research institutions, funding agencies and individual authors).
Publishers like Hindawi and PeerJ claimed much lower costs per article; whereas, Most of the reputed journals associated with well established publishers are stating that there is not much raise in the revenue compared to the number of articles, because of the production and editorial costs involved.
We are not here to guilt someone, but all the numbers mentioned above are facts and still there are so many individual authors from the low economic regions have been struggling to get publish their work, as they could not afford the Article Processing Charges (APC). Whereas most of the publishers have increased their Article Processing Charges (APC).
The raise in the number of predatory publishers and journals has been resulting in lack of transparency and accountability and became one of the predominant issues in the sector of STM publishing. Predatory publishers are practicing questionable and unethical publishing processes for achieving the core objective of making money from the authors. These publishers adopting frivolous practices like: fake geographical identity, coining journal titles that are very similar to some existing reputed journals and, projecting self-acclaimed or fake impact factors and sending un-solicited E-mails to attract the scientific community. They follow unethical review processes and even some of them completely avoid conducting standard peer-review process and publish every article they received for publication. They publish articles which do not have any scientific prominence, just to exploit money from the authors in the name of article publishing charges.
Such predatory publishers should ask themselves an inevitable question, that do they really understand the fragility of publishing unscientific articles and the deep negative impact and further consequences of publishing such unauthentic and pseudo science articles?
There are instances such as, so many genuine authors were also becoming victims and losing their credibility by publishing their work in journals associated with this predatory publishers
Most of the big and reputed publishers were doing their production related operations from lower economic regions to reduce the production costs and pretending as operating from headquarters situated in some higher economic regions (The predatory publishers were also replicating the same strategy to attract the global scientific community). The publishers are directly or indirectly supporting and spreading metaphorical claims such as, there is no possibility to reduce the article publishing charges; as the cost of production per article published has been increasing annually. Here, we all should remember that most of the peer-reviews are non-paid or free contributions by the reviewers from across the world. They somehow failed in maintaining quality conduct, standard timelines and confidentialities which are quintessential in the production.
Despite of addressing these issues, the large publishers are making the global scientific community to think in a conservative manner at the time of choosing a publisher on the basis of impact factors, publishers brand value and geographical identity (mostly fake).
Without having proper knowledge, some authors were opting to submit their work for publishing in these predatory journals because of complex timelines of reputed journal, project deadlines, and peer-pressure. In some cases, these kinds of publications were affecting the careers of authors very badly and resulting in termination of grants, funding and other supports for their future projects.
It's time for the global scientific community to stop being ignorant and/or rhetorical towards such frivolous and greedy publishers and should stand strong against them. Together we could bring a much needed change in the scholarly publishing sector.
We all should think in such a way, that any little change can be the beginning of a bigger change. And if we don't appreciate the small differences, the bigger differences will never happen.
We request the entire scientific community to understand the fact that, the publishers are using your relentless works and invaluable contributions as an inventory in achieving high impact factors for their associated journals and in building their brand value. But, all these years the scientific community who’re exponentially contributing in the ground level and creating an impact don’t seem to be getting enough credit. We all should remember that, no publisher could ever exist or survive without the support of editors, authors, reviewers and readers (Scientific community members).
We strongly believe that, we could achieve strong credibility and high impact factors with help of our ethical approaches and with the support and invaluable contributions of our team (authors and editorial team). The fundamental objective of publishing an article is to share the knowledge with the world. We should understand that, getting more number of citations for an article is depends on how widely it has been reached to the global audiences. And, with ‘Future Access’ we could be able to disseminate authentic knowledge to the maximum number of audiences from around the world with the support of our expert search optimizing team.
'PRoPAKnowledge' is dedicated to provide the best cost effective publishing model named “Future Access” which perpetuates global quality quotient in scholarly publishing. Whereas an individual author have been spending an average of upto $3000 USD to get publish one manuscript on contemporary online journals; But Future Access model enables an author to publish 10 manuscripts and also address some of the pressing real world problems with the same amount of money. Future Access connects us to the world through a perennial hope of unfolding limitless possibilities. While the world is running behind disruptive technologies, we all should act with emotional intelligence and righteous perception which is much needed in these days.
We request the global scientific community to first have the facts in place and understand the importance of taking a collective and individual responsibility of creating an ecosystem which is viable in economical ecological terms. As, digitization and the internet access to most parts of the world reduce the cost of production in unbelievable fraction of what it used to be; We appeal to the global scientific community to understand the possibilities of publishing with 'PRoPAKnowledge' and leverage those funds to strengthening the global healthcare systems and support innovative research.
These challenging times have exposed the vulnerability of lives and the recent pandemic reveals that, never it has been more important than now for all the policy makers, Funding agencies, Universities and Research institutions to reform their policies and should emphasis on new age publishing model which is more cost effective and which could disseminate the knowledge to the wider range audiences with the help of technological advancements, rather than imposing restrictions on authors based on certain measures which are not pragmatic. Also the authors should be given the right to choose suitable and reliable sources for publishing their work. Future access is such a pragmatic publishing model which can empower the scientific community by providing best publishing services at lowest possible cost.
We designed a purely transparent fee structure with added humane values, which could bring an unprecedented change and possibilities. ‘PRoPAKnowledge’ charges a unified amount as APC (Article Processing Charges) regardless of the article type.
The clear annexure of APC (Article Processing Charges) for publishing one paper on our Future Access journals would be as follows:
|
Particulars |
$US |
₹INR |
€Eur |
||
|
Contributon towards Nature and Wildlife Conservation (Will be donated to Dr. Jane Goodall institute) |
$20 |
₹1250 |
€17.5 |
||
|
Contribution towards providing Nutritious food and basic education for underprivileged children (Will be donated to Akshaya Patra Foundation and Pratyusha Foundation) |
$30 |
₹3000 |
€25 |
||
|
Contribution towards supporting the welfare of Poor farmers (Will be donated to farmers who needs support) |
$20 |
₹750 |
€17.5 |
||
|
Contribution towards supporting scientific community members (Women in science and other community members from the lower economic regions of the world) |
$20 |
₹750 |
€18 |
||
|
End to End Publishing costs ( inclusive of production and technical team expenditure; other pre-publishing costs like copyediting, various designing and PDF building costs, web hosting and servers maintenance costs, Govt. taxes) |
$171 |
₹1378 |
€164 |
||
|
Total |
$261 |
₹7128 |
€242 |
||
Annual Membership: Any institutions and/or individual authors who’re interested in becoming an annual member of 'PRoPAKnowledge' journals should approach our journal office with a signed quotation mentioning average numbers of articles can be submitted for publication within an academic year and the amount annual fees that they could afford. Please understand that, we have came up with this kind of membership model, just to support the global scientific community members who publishes multiple papers every year by providing a pragmatic solution which is economically viable and culturally strong. 'PRoPAKnowledge', is an independently operating publishing organization and we do not receive any financial support from any individual/ institutions. As we all are aware of the average APC (Article Processing Charges) for publishing an article is more than $2000 USD, we request you to come up with a more reasonable annual membership quotations rather than expecting to take things for granted.
Editorial Board members benefits: Our Editorial board members would get a straight 15% fee waiver on every submission. Note: The respective Editorial board member should be the corresponding author for the submitted work.
Review benefits: Our reviewers get complete fee waiver on publishing one paper per every five papers they reviewed.
Individual author benefits: An individual author who has submitted three articles for publication as a corresponding author would get a complete fee waiver on their fourth submission.