Hi, I am Dr. Varshil Mehta, a medical graduate and the founder of one of the Journal. Lately, I have realized that PKP provides sponsorship or acts as a liaison for waiving fees for CrossRef. I am from India, a Low-Medium Economy with GNI little greater than 1,500 $. I am also studying for my post graduate steps and hence unemployed for now. I requested a waiver or sponsorship for CrossRef from PKP, however, since India’s GNI is greater than 1,500$, I was told that they need to talk to CrossRef and update their criteria, because India’s GNI is a bit higher than 1,500$ (appx 1,709$).
My request here is to allot sponsorship on a case to case basis and not on country basis. India has billionaires but also have 1/3rd population below the poverty line. Most of us can not afford 300-400$ services given by CrossRef. Likewise, even people living in a western developed country should be eligible, if their economic status is not stable enough. Yes, there are people who passes through those stages every where when they want support and when their economic stability improves, they return the favor by helping others.
I feel that rather sponsoring such services to Institutions or organisation who can afford these services but have a privilege since they reside in low or medium economic countries, it shall be better, if sponsorship is given on case to case basis and to those who are not earning any penny from any one, since they want to provide free services to the world for better. May be this clause can also be included to not to charge any fees from any one and provide open access to every one.
FYI: I am extremely happy with PKP for giving a wonderful opportunity to these countries who really cant afford! I am also really grateful to every one here who have helped me to make such a wonderful journal.
I also pledge that if I am given sponsorship, I will not only re-pay every penny that PKP has spent, but also sponsor on the name of PKP for one such deserving journal for the same time that my journal has been sponsored, once i get my residency started.
James from PKP here. I manage the Crossref stuff, including our sponsored entity relationship with Crossref. We’ll be meeting with them in the next week or so to see if we can raise the ceiling on what is an acceptable limit for GNI. @varshilmehta, we will let you know, once we’ve had a chance to discuss with Crossref, what the plan will be here.
Many thanks, in the meantime, for your thoughts on this. Your suggestion makes a lot of sense to me, but unfortunately I don’t think it will be possible, at least at this time. We are a very small team, and providing this sponsorship as a general service to assist where we can. We don’t currently have the staff resources available to evaluate potential sponsored members on a case-by-case basis, especially in terms of their finances. Our current criteria is obviously very far from perfect, but it does provide us with something we can support at our current staff levels.
A general note: it’s also worth noting that it is not PKP that is sponsoring the deposits—Crossref provides free deposits to certain countries, and those are the countries we take on. In practice, we sponsor their membership fee. It’s a small point, but worth noting!
Ironically, you still ask for help from an Indian journal/publisher! I just saw your mail in my spam box. It is not good to generalise things. We have way better and more journals than total number of journals published from your country. So from next time onwards, think twice before you put allegations on some one or especially on a country. This is an international forum. According to your logic, if there is a terrorist residing in a country, then all citizens are terrorist, right? Its sad to hear such illogical views from a person associated with an academic world.
