“Open Access publishing currently grows at a rate of 1% per year. About 17% of 1.66 million articles indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus is now published in OA. The message to publishers is clear: move fast or perish.
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Étiquette : Open Access
Three things open access is not | Scholarly Communications @ Duke
“Lots of news stories and emails flying around about open access in the past few weeks, and as I tried to think what theme might bring them together, I realized that I wanted to talk about three things that open access is not. Here they are:
First, open access is not more prone to abuse than other types of publishing. We hear a lot about “predatory” open access journals, and recently we have also heard a lot about fraud and retracted articles from traditional journals. We need to connect the dots and realize that both systems can be abused, just as all systems devised by human agents can be.”
The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date – ePrints Soton
“This paper presents a summary of reported studies on the Open Access citation advantage. There is a brief introduction to the main issues involved in carrying out such studies, both methodological and interpretive. The study listing provides some details of the coverage, methodological approach and main conclusions of each study.
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Clarification of the new open-access policy at the Research Councils UK (RCUK)
On July 25, 2012, I had a long, helpful phone conversation with Mark Thorley, convenor of the RCUK Research Outputs Network (RON), the group responsible for developing and implementing the RCUK Open Access policy.
I initially contacted him to talk about what I took to be important differences between the new RCUK policy
Humanities left behind in the dash for open access
About this time last year, open access had apparently come of age. According to a study published in the journal PloS One, freely accessible publishing had passed from an early experimental phase into a period of consolidation, with the number of papers showing steady growth. The model had been shown to work.
New and exciting kid on the block: PeerJ | A Blog Around The Clock, Scientific American Blog Network
“As many of you know, before accepting a job at Scientific American, I worked at PLoS for three years (and became a vocal Open Access Evangelist even before that). While there, I worked closely with Pete Binfield who replaced Chris Surridge as managing editor of PLoS ONE shortly after my arrival there. Pete and I became friends, bumped into each other at meetings, he came to ScienceOnline at least a couple of times, and we remained in frequent contact after my move.”
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 1
Scholarly publishing is totally broken. Not only, at present, can most of the people (taxpayers) who fund research not get access to it, but plans to fix this look set to screw over Early Career Researchers and anybody else who can’t persuade their funders to give them the up-front fees required by publishers for Open Access journals.
The OA Interviews: Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado Denver
In 2004 the scholarly publisher Elsevier made a written submission to the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. Elsevier asserted that the traditional model used to publish research papers — where readers, and institutions like libraries, pay the costs of producing scholarly journals through subscriptions — “ensures high quality, independent peer review and prevents commercial interests from influencing decisions to publish.”
Publication fees in open access publishing: Sources of funding and factors influencing choice of journal – Solomon – 2011 – Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library
“Open access (OA) journals distribute their content at no charge and use other means of funding the publication process. Publication fees or article-processing charges (APC)s have become the predominant means for funding professional OA publishing. We surveyed 1,038 authors who recently published articles in 74 OA journals that charge APCs stratified into seven discipline categories. Authors were asked about the source of funding for the APC, factors influencing their choice of a journal and past history publishing in OA and subscription journals. Additional information about the journal and the authors’ country were obtained from the journal website. A total of 429 (41%) authors from 69 journals completed the survey. There were large differences in the source of funding among disciplines. Journals with impact factors charged higher APCs as did journals from disciplines where grant funding is plentiful. Fit, quality, and speed of publication were the most important factors in the authors’ choice of a journal. OA was less important but a significant factor for many authors in their choice of a journal to publish. These findings are consistent with other research on OA publishing and suggest that OA publishing funded through APCs is likely to continue to grow.”
Techdirt: Academic Publishing Profits Enough To Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field
The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial “it’ll never work” to the “maybe it’ll work, but it’s not sustainable” stage. That raises a valid point, of course: who will pay for journals that make their content freely available online?
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