Saeed Shah, Reed Elsevier facing fresh threat to science journal profits, The Independent, January 6, 2005. Excerpt: 'Five more leading science journals are to partly or fully abandon charging subscriptions and take up the "open access" model, it has emerged, in a blow to traditional publishers in the sector such as Reed Elsevier. An influential government-funded organisation, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), will announce later this week that it is providing funding to the journals in order to aid the transition to the "author-pays" or open access. Fred Friend, a consultant to the JISC and a leading advocate of open access, said: "Reed's problem is that it's had a very easy life for a number of years, based on secure funding from libraries. That gravy train's coming to an end because libraries cannot afford it any more." The publications involved in the JISC initiative are The New Journal of Physics (published by the Institute of Physics Publishing); Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford University Press); Journal of Medical Genetics (British Medical Journals); the journals of the International Union of Crystallography; and The Journal of Experimental Botany (The Society for Experimental Biology)....Martin Richardson, managing director of journals at Oxford University Press, said: "Open access has not so far been shown to be commercially viable. This JISC grant will ensure a sufficiently large sample to see how well it works." JISC's had previously backed a smaller trial, involving some of the same journals. It said yesterday that the results had been extremely encouraging. For instance, the New Journal of Physics saw a 300 per cent jump in author submissions, while the Journal of Experimental Biology saw access rise by 27 per cent.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/05/2005 10:16:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
