Open Access News

David Stern of Yale University led off with his talk "Open Archive Initiatives: underlying issues and long-term implications." His focus, he said, was "free and immediate access for readers," and that he did not consider the author payment model to be full open access. Stern named some factors affecting the open access issue, including copyright and intellectual property, security, archiving and migration and peer review, pointing out in particular that it is "hard to subsidize a peer reviewed archive," alluding to real costs. In lieu of measures such as author page charges he suggested OA journals might offer "enhanced services," like "threaded discussions and virtual reviews." Stern then surveyed the interests of various stakeholders in OA. While readers want "immediate" and "seamless" access to reliable and accurate content, and authors share such interests as well as peer review and "the least publishable unit," editors seek efficiency in the review process, and publishers are concerned with offering access and services but also maintaining a viable revenue model. The speaker also asked the audience to consider the costs of archiving and how these might be borne in OA (e.g. government funding, publishers offering fee-based services such as navigation and reviews,) and whether costs and content might be shared. Finally, Stern alluded to librarians' responsibility to participate in the debate and that it required "collaboration with all stakeholders."

Chuck Hamaker of University of North Carolina-Charlotte followed with an overview of major recent events in the development of OA, including the BOAI, Bethesda and DC principles. He noted confusions that arise between journals that are "free and free at some time," such as many on the Highwire platform, noting that readers "just want the article." In particular he cited the Wellcome Trust's report's noting of OA that papers would be judged by the "intrinsic merit of the work and not the journal title." Hamaker also remarked on several author payment initiatives, including the Entomological Society of America journals, where evidently more than 62% of authors pay to enable open access to their articles. Finally, Hamaker reviewed major OA-related tools such as OAISter and ePrints and acknowledged that OA is a work in progress; "it's coming, it's certainly not here yet."

Long Island University's David Goodman gave a speculative presentation, "Alternative Fates for the Journal System." He diagrammed the financial path for conventional journals, OA, and repositories, pointing out where the money comes from, explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the latter two models, and remarking that repositories would always play a role, particularly because of preprints. Goodman then suggested four possible outcomes, plotted on charts reflecting relative use and subscription year. First, he suggested that if OA journals grow and succeed, the conventional journal system would shrink to less than half its size by 2008, while repositories continue steady growth. In the second scenario, repositories develop before OA and OA journals follow as an overlay to repositories while the conventional journal systems withers, again predicted for 2008. Goodman's third possibility reflected the failure of both conventional and OA journals, due to unsustainable costs for libraries, and the growth of repositories "by default." The last scenario, titled "Publishers act rationally in self-preservation," showed a decline in the number of conventional journals and growth in OA journals and then a levelling off, somewhere around 2009. This "rational alternative" would involve commercial publishers making the system "affordable." Finally, Goodman noted the gap in perceptions of journal necessity among publishers, librarians, physicists and biologists, and concluded with a slide of a tombstone suggesting the imminent demise of the more than three centuries of traditional scholarly journal publishing.