Making Journals Freely Accessible
June 12, 2008 – 9:41 amCreated with support from the National Library of Sweden and its development program OpenAccess.se
Jörgen Eriksson, 2007
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/se/
Description
The information in this section is directed to the individual who needs to inform members of scholarly societies, journal editors and publishers. The purpose of the section is to provide a survey of the different possibilities that exist when you want to make the contents in an existing journal more accessible or if you want to start a new Open Access journal.
Making a subscription-based journal freely accessible (or lowering the subscription fee)
If you form part of a journal editorial staff or belong to a scholarly society which puts out journals there are possibilities to influence how and where the journal should be published. A step-by-step description of how to proceed practically follows here.
1. Try to find out whether the journal is reasonably priced. Part of this information can be found by using Bergstrom-McAfees Journal cost-effectiveness search.
The price per article and price per quoting is listed there and the journal is also given an index number. A colour coding system is also used with “expensive” journals marked in red and those worth their price marked in “green”. It is recommendable to make your own investigation apart from this [1]
If the journal appears to be unreasonably expensive the next step may be to
2. Contact the publishing company and ask for a price reduction. This measure will of course carry more weight if done collectively, as editorial staff or society. If the publishing company is not willing to lower the price so as to reach an acceptable level there are different ways to proceed depending on whether you are a member of a society which owns its journal or member of the editorial staff of a journal owned by a commercial publishing company.
3. If the journal is owned by a scholarly society you may try to influence the society to change publisher. Here are also two alternatives. Either you continue to base the business model on subscription revenues, but you use a traditional publishing company with more reasonable pricing, or you change business model and make the journal freely accessible.
4. If the journal is owned by a commercial publishing company the editorial staff may move and start an alternative journal at another publishing company which either applies a more reasonable pricing or where the journal will become freely accessible.
Examples of such alternative journals are Evolutionary Ecology Research, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. Cambridge University Press published the TPLP as an alternative to the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming.
A highly interesting letter in which Donald Knuth, a legend in computer science, explains to the other members of the editorial staff why he has come to decide that he wants to break off the collaboration with the Journal of Algorithms, started by Knuth himself, constitutes valuable reading. The letter resulted in the editorial staff breaking off the collaboration with Elsevier to start a new journal, Transactions on Algorithms, published by ACM.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) provides guides and can also offer advice and in certain cases financial support to processes which aim to increase the accessibility of journals through price reductions or change-overs to OA.
Starting a new OA journal or making an already existing journal freely accessible: the practice
Once you have decided to start an OA journal you may either do it at an existing OA publishing company or publish it at your own publishing company.
There are not many existing publishing companies with an absolute OA profile. Without any claim to a complete list some of them follow here.
BioMed Central, which besides biomedicine also publishes journals in biology, ecology and chemistry, has an entry with information about that which is required to start a new journal or add an existing one.
Hindawi is a rapidly growing publishing company that publishes journals in technology, physics, biosciences and mathematics. Information about how to proceed is obtained through contacting the publishing company.
Linköping University Electronic Press offers the possibility to use their services to publish OA journals.
Another Swedish initiative for primarily medical journals is medicaljournals.se which at present puts out two medical journals (Acta Dermato-Venerologica and Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine) and which has changed over from a commercial publishing company to publishing under their own direction. The possibility to buy OA for separate articles at a publication fee exists here and the long-term goal is a complete OA solution. Other journals that are interested in using the same platform may contact the Editorial Manager of the journals.
One alternative is to use a Web Hotel service where the host answers for the technical solution and the remaining work is managed by the journal. Two examples of services with an OA direction and special software for journal publishing are the Simon Fraser University Library and the Scholarly Exchange .
Here, for example, lies another possibility for a library to offer the service of publishing the local series which are produced at most seats of learning.
Finally, one can also set up one’s own system and manage the publishing of a journal privately. SPARC maintains a list of accessible software. The one mostly used today is Open Journals Systems.
Indexing/Visibility/Standards
In order to draw attention to that which is published in the new journal, and read and quoted, it is important for the journal to be as visible as possible. Google and Google Scholar are important services for indexing but there are also the traditional index- and abstract databases. The journal subject will be decisive for which services to choose for visibility. SPARC gives a short introduction to becoming visible in this type of services and a presentation of some of the larger ones.
It is also important to think of a type of new specialized search services which collect data from institutional repositories and other open scholarly services which use the OAI-PMH protocol (see module 3). An important service here is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which, if you are OAI-PMH compatible, also makes the journal contents searchable on article level (http://www.doaj.org/ ).
Long-term preservation
Traditionally, libraries have handled the long-term preservation and the accessibility of journals. When it comes to electronic journals the situation is less clear. Certain publishing companies like Elsevier and BioMed Central have entered into agreements with the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague which has undertaken the preservation of their journals. In Sweden e-deposit legislation is in progress which will make the National Library responsible for the long-term preservation. The legislation is expected to come sometime in 2008 or 2009 and it has not been clarified yet what needs preservation. A complement to the electronic archiving is to make a number of print-outs (using paper of archival quality) and, for example, bind yearly volumes and send to the National Library and the university libraries for archiving. A new report from JISC describes the work with finding new ways for the preservation of e-journals:
[1] “I speak from first-hand experience of what happens when profits take over. In 1986, I started a journal in the field of evolutionary ecology. The initial subscription price was $35 per year for individuals, $100 for libraries. Within a twelve year period, during which the journal changed ownership twice, the price for libraries had grown to nearly $800 per year, an average annual increase of 19%. I did the math. I estimated that my publisher pocketed profit of between $170,000 and $220,000 annually, a mark-up of about 275% and a profit margin of nearly 75%.”
Michael L. Rosenzweig, Editor-in-Chief, Evolutionary Ecology Research Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona
http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/Declaring_Independence_Selection.pdf
Further reading
General literature on scholarly communication and its development
Garfield, Eugene (1980). Has Scientific Communication Changed in 300 Years?. In Essays of an Information Scientist. Vol:4, pp.394-400, 1979-80 Current Contents, #8, pp.5-11, February 25 (Electronic). Access: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v4p394y1979-80.pdf (14 May 2007)
Guédon, Jean-Claude (2001). In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow : Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing. Proceedings Creating the Digital Future : Association of Research Libraries 138th Annual Meeting (Electronic). Access:http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00003951/01/ARL_Proceedings_138_In_Oldenburg’s_Long_Shadow,_by_Guedon.htm (14 May 2007).
Rosendaal, Hans E. and Geurts, Peter A. Th. M (1998). Forces and functions in scientific communication: an analysis of their interplay. In CRISP97. Cooperative Research Information Systems in Physics (Electronic). Access: http://www.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/conferences/crisp97/roosendaal.html
OA journals
Hedlund, Turid and Gustafsson, Tomas and Björk, Bo-Christer (2004). The Open Access Scientific Journal: An Empirical Study. Learned Publishing, Vol. 17, pp. 199-209 (Electronic). Access: http://oacs.shh.fi/publications/199-210.pdf (14 May 2007).
Heylighen, Francis (2006). Why is Open Access Development so Successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information. In B. Lutterbeck, M. Baerwolff & R. A. Gehring (eds.), Open Source Jahrbuch 2007, Lehmanns Media (Electronic). Access: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs.CY/0612071 (ArXiv) (14 May 2007).
Morris, Sally (2003). Open Publishing: How Publishers are Reacting. Information Services and Use, Vol. 23, No. 2-3, pp. 99-101 (Electronic). Access:http://www.metapress.com/content/blnkwkj0wvvjbfg8/fulltext.pdf (14 May 2007). Sally Morris, who represents the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers, gives the existing publishing companies’ view on OA.
Poynder, Richard (2007). Open Access: The War in Europe. Blog (Electronic). Access: http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/df04/The_War_in_Europe.pdf (14 May 2007). A brilliant and current analysis of the journal market and OA.
Waltham, Mary (2005). Learned Society Open Access Business Models. JISC (Electronic). Access: http://www.marywaltham.com/JISCReport.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Learned%20Society%20Open%20Access%20Business%20Models.doc (14 May 2007).
Willinsky, John (2003). Scholarly Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing. Journal of Digital Information, Vol. 4, Issue 2, Article No. 177 (Electronic). Access: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i02/Willinsky/ (14 May 2007).
Worlock, Kate (2004). Open access and learned societies - Will open access prove a blessing or a curse to learned societies? Nature web focus (Electronic). Access: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/8.html (2007-05-14).
Long-term preservation
Jones, Maggie (2007). About e-Journals: Archiving and Preservation. JISC (Electronic) Access: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_ejournalspreservationbp (14 May 2007).
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