[T]he academic societies serving clinicians, faculty, and researchers in the basic and clinical health sciences will play a central role in determining the ultimate success of “open access” alternatives to commercial publishing. Academic societies provide health sciences students, faculty, clinicians, and researchers with their natural international community of peers and collaborators....The following is a brief report on the results of two recent studies conducted in partnership with the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) and designed to look at the changing publishing practices of academic societies. Carried out from July 2003 through December 2004, these studies looked at the characteristics of journals published by academic societies affiliated with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and High Wire Press as well as titles listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The first study was cosponsored by AAHSL and AAMC through its Council of Academic Societies (CAS), which included some ninety-four member societies representing academic disciplines taught in schools of medicine. The primary goal of this study was to help these societies, as well as AAMC member institutions and their libraries, understand the problems and opportunities faced by the CAS society journals as they shift from paper to electronic publishing. The second study was cosponsored by ALPSP, High Wire Press, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and AAMC and was conducted by the Kaufman-Wills Group in Baltimore, Maryland. Called “Variations on Open Access,” this study sought to determine the potential impact of open access publishing on the business, editorial, and licensing practices of scholarly society journal publishers.
Of the 98 CAS members, 51 (52%) sponsor or publish at least 1 journal and, altogether, these societies publish just over 100 titles. Nearly half of these journals (46%) are published by or with the help of a commercial publisher, with Elsevier publishing twice as many as the next largest commercial publisher of these journals. A very large percentage of these titles are relatively new, with 42% first published since 1980. The average CAS journal publishes fewer than 2,500 pages per year and distributes more than 5,200 copies. These journals have relatively high ISI impact factors with an average of 5.100, but ranging up to 36.278. Print subscriptions for 2004 averaged $546 per journal, and those prices had increased more than 100% over the previous 5 years on average, or more than 15% per year...Over half (53%) provide free access to at least some journal content from a Website, and nearly half (46%) have an electronic repository policy for back volumes. A very large majority (80%) has policies and procedures for licensing online access to libraries or consortia. Interestingly, a significant percentage (33%) maintains online versions of the journal that are not the same as the print version.
(PS: For details on the Kaufman-Wills study, see the final version published earlier this month.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/25/2005 08:40:00 AM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
