Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure :

“Background : Open access (OA) is a revolutionary way of providing access to the scholarly journal literature made possible by the Internet. The primary aim of this study was to measure the volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals from 2000 to 2011, while observing longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of OA publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types and relative distribution among scientific disciplines. The secondary aim was to measure the share of OA articles of all journal articles, including articles made OA by publishers with a delay and individual author-paid OA articles in subscription journals (hybrid OA), as these subsets of OA publishing have mostly been ignored in previous studies.

Methods : Stratified random sampling of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (n = 787) was performed. The annual publication volumes spanning 2000 to 2011 were retrieved from major publication indexes and through manual data collection.

Results : An estimated 340,000 articles were published by 6,713 full immediate OA journals during 2011. OA journals requiring article-processing charges have become increasingly common, publishing 166,700 articles in 2011 (49% of all OA articles). This growth is related to the growth of commercial publishers, who, despite only a marginal presence a decade ago, have grown to become key actors on the OA scene, responsible for 120,000 of the articles published in 2011. Publication volume has grown within all major scientific disciplines, however, biomedicine has seen a particularly rapid 16-fold growth between 2000 (7,400 articles) and 2011 (120,900 articles). Over the past decade, OA journal publishing has steadily increased its relative share of all scholarly journal articles by about 1% annually. Approximately 17% of the 1.66 million articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers, most articles immediately (12%) but some within 12 months of publication (5%).

Conclusions : OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, having rapidly grown in relative annual share of published journal articles during the last decade.”

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124

The Role of the Academic Journal Publisher and Open Access Publishing Models :

“This article explores the role and value of the academic journal publisher as paradigms of Open Access gain momentum and challenge the standards of paid subscription models. To recover the costs of publication services (which include everything from printing copies to online hosting and protection of intellectual property rights), publishers have traditionally employed a model in which subscribing individuals or institutions pay for access to content. The two main versions of Open Access publishing currently at large—Gold (in which a funding body or person pays the publisher to make the content freely available) and Green (in which there are no payments made for publication and articles are archived in free public repositories)—pose a challenge to the user-pays models that have served as a foundation of the business since its inception. However, these changes do not portend an undermining of the importance or viability of the academic journal publisher.”

The academic journal-publishing industry was born in 1665, when the Royal Society in London launched the world’s first peer-reviewed journal, Philosophical Transactions. In the years since, the industry has evolved a great deal, but the role of the academic journal publisher has remained largely unchanged. We continue to perform the functions that the Royal Society envisioned so long ago: registering and date stamping new research findings across the disciplines; ensuring the highest quality through a rigorous system of peer review; disseminating material as broadly as possible so that those who require it may access it; and creating a permanent archive as a legacy for future generations. Publishers of academic journals have long played a vital role in the research process, and we believe our work will continue to be valued highly by researchers, students, practitioners, and librarians for many years to come.

Today, about 2,000 publishers—including learned societies, other not-for-profit organizations, and commercial enterprises—produce more than 25,000 journals across the disciplines (Ware and Mabe 2009). The journal-publishing enterprise is a complex one that requires significant expertise and resources. For each of the 1.5 million journal articles which appear each year, publishers manage a complex process of peer review, including the appointing and relationship management of editorial boards; the licensing of editorial office workflow systems; strategic development and branding; the copyediting and formatting of papers for both print and electronic production; print manufacture, mailing, and warehousing; enhanced electronic features such as linking and citation metrics; the facilitation of discovery and access, involving highly sophisticated and expensive online platforms; and a range of other activities which ensure quality, consistency, authority, stewardship, and the protection of the author’s and the publisher’s intellectual property rights. Much of this work requires specialized training and/or education, and our industry employs about 110,000 people globally in a range of roles (Ware and Mabe 2009). Publishers also invest heavily in supporting the editorial process and in developing new systems and technologies which aid in preparing and disseminating research material. Collectively, we have invested more than $3.5 billion in online publishing technology alone since the year 2000 (Taylor, Russell and Mabe 2010).

For many decades, journal publishers recovered costs via a subscription model, in which libraries and/or individuals purchased access (originally print copies and increasingly a combination of print and online access) to the journals. The Internet and the new communication tools which have resulted from it have allowed us to experiment with and develop a range of new models for getting the content we publish into the hands of people who wish to have it. Over the past 15–20 years, the combination of investments in technology (by publishers as well as others), and the formation of library purchasing consortia around the world (assisted by publishers, in many cases), has significantly and cost-effectively accelerated and broadened access to, and usage of, journal articles (see, for example, RIN (2009a), which shows that, in the UK, full-text article downloads more than doubled between the academic years 2003–04 and 2006–07, with a compound annual growth rate of 21.7% and with the cost of access falling to about 80 pence per article). Publishers and philanthropic organizations have also formed partnerships which have allowed for free or very low-cost access to academic journals in the developing world, meaning that more researchers and practitioners in these areas now have access to the most current research findings (see www.research4life.org/about.html). A key feature of the subscription model which has existed for so many years is that it has provided publishers with a reliable way to recover costs and earn a profit (or, for not-for-profit publishers, a surplus) that can be reinvested in the business.”

URL : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1528-3585.2012.00495.x/full

The Case for Open Access Publishing :

“This article presents some of the main efficiency and fairness arguments in favor of open access publishing. It discusses how general open access could affect research and editorial practice. It ends with a discussion of the feasibility of open access and how a move to open access publishing could happen.

This article contains a discussion of some of the core issues related to the economics of open access journal publishing. By “open access,” I refer to full open access, which simply means that all published academic articles of a particular journal are available for download by anyone over the Internet free of charge. In this limited space, I primarily cover issues where I think I have something to say. The article contains a mix of my personal views as an academic, as an economist, and as an editor of a minor open access journal.

The issues I raise relate both to economic efficiency and to fairness. I will point to the general benefits of open access and in particular to the distribution to poor countries. I base the discussion on my own experience in publishing an open access journal. I end the discussion by some thoughts on the realism and feasibility of a general transition to open access. My experience is primarily from economics, but clearly, it has some relevance for other social science disciplines as well as for the humanities. I think, however, that the issue of open access in disciplines such as medicine, where commercial interests are much more important, has to be approached differently. For readers who want to go deeper into the various aspects of the economics of open access publishing, I recommend the two symposia in Economic Analysis and Policy (2009) and in Nature (2004) and a report on the costs and benefits of open access publishing (Houghton et al. 2009). All these are appropriately available online, free of charge.”

URL : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1528-3585.2012.00490.x/full