Mark Ware Consulting, Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments, a white paper from ALPSP and STM, September 2006. See esp. pp. 16-26, which are devoted to OA, including the OA citation advantage, OA journal business models and their viability, and OA archiving. From the executive summary:
[9] There are some 2000-2400 open access journals in existence, publishing about 2–5% of total articles. They use a variety of funding models, grants, membership subscriptions, sponsorship/advertising, commercial reprints, classified advertising, subscriptions to print editions, volunteer labour, and subsidy or support in kind by the host organisation. The best-known approach, is the “author-side payment” model, where a publication charge (mostly in the range $2–3000) is levied on each accepted article (page 16).
[10] It is still too early to say for sure how viable open access publishing will be. Neither of the leading pioneers, Public Library of Science and BioMed Central are even close to profitability. The available data are patchy but, taken together, suggest that achieving widespread sustainability for open access journals will not be particularly quick or easy (page 19).
[11] The other route to open access is via self-archiving, whereby the author posts a version of the article (typically the revised manuscript after peer review but prior to copyediting, known as a post-print, rather than the final published article) to an open web-based repository. These repositories can either be central, subject-based collections (e.g. the well-known physics repository, arXiv) or organised to collect the output of a particular institution (page 22).
[12] A worrying development for publishers is the emergence of policies by research funders and by authors’ employers requiring the deposit of articles in such repositories. The US National Institutes of Health introduced such a policy in 2005, and has subsequently been followed by the Wellcome Trust and some of the Research Councils in the UK, and others in France, Germany and elsewhere (page 25).
[13] Publishers fear that widespread systematic self-archiving of this kind will have a serious impact on journal subscriptions, the revenue stream that supports the vast majority of journals. There is evidence from physics and elsewhere that archiving reduces the amount of use of articles get on the publisher’s website (readers get the articles from the repository instead). There is also some evidence from a survey of librarians that this is becoming an increasingly important factor in considering journal cancellations. A major study on this subject by Scholarly Information Strategies for the Publishing Research Consortium is due to report on this during October (page 26).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2006 08:36:00 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.
