Swiss academy moots open-access fund for social sciences

Switzerland should set up a fund to support 15-20 open-access academic journals in the humanities and social sciences, the country’s national academy for these disciplines has suggested.

The fund should be used to subsidise journals that cannot be financed by membership fees from learned societies, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences said in a proposal published on 19 September.

A budget of 700,000 Swiss francs (€639,000) for 2021-24 would allow the journals to operate without subscription fees or article-processing charges for authors, meaning that anyone would be able to publish and read articles in them, SAHS said.