Blackwell Publishing has announced that it is adopting the author's choice model of open access (which I've often called the Walker-Prosser model) for many of its journals. From today's press release: 'Blackwell Publishing today announced the launch of a new service which will benefit the authors and readers of many of its journals. Online Open offers authors the opportunity to make their articles freely available to all users of the internet in perpetuity on payment of a publication fee....The new Online Open service will be on trial through to the end of 2006. During this period, authors of accepted articles will have the option to pay a fee of US$2500 or £1250 (plus VAT where applicable) which will ensure that their article is made freely accessible to all via our online journals platform Blackwell Synergy. Online Open articles will be published to exactly the same high standards as subscription-based articles, following the full peer-review process and benefiting from the same production procedures and online features. Online Open articles will also appear in the print edition of journals with an indicator pointing to the free access online....The subscription prices for journals participating in the Online Open trial will be adjusted according to the number of author-pays articles that each journal expects to publish in the following year....Blackwell Publishing is consulting with the societies for whom it publishes on whether they wish to be included in the trial of Online Open. The company will issue an initial list of those journals participating within the next two months and will add any other journals as societies choose to join. Blackwell expects that most of the initial journals in the trial will be in biology or medicine, subjects where there is likely to be funding for the author-pays model.' For more details, see Blackwell's Online Open site or its position on open access.
(PS: Congratulations to Blackwell for undertaking this helpful experiment. Springer deserves credit for being the first TA publisher to adopt this model across the board (July 2004). See Springer's Open Choice program. But Blackwell deserves credit for charging a lower processing fee and spreading the model to society journals.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/24/2005 04:27:00 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.
