Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, August 13, 2005

An Elsevier OA journal experiment

An August 12 announcement from Albert R. Meyer, Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal, Information and Computation:
The Editorial Board and Publisher of Information and Computation are pleased to announce that for one year, effective immediately, online access to all journal issues back to 1995 will be available without charge. This includes unrestricted downloading of articles in pdf format. Retrieval traffic during the open access period will be considered as future subscription policies are formulated. Journal articles may be obtained on Elsevier's Sciencedirect [here].

Comment: I don't consider introductory offers to be OA, and feel the same way about most other kinds of temporary free online access. However, this looks more like an OA experiment than a marketing ploy. If you haven't had the experience of free online access to full-text articles from an Elsevier journal, check this out. If you're in the field of information theory or computer science, spread the word. This journal needs the traffic and impact to justify extending the experiment.