They weren’t generally called Open Access journals in 1995: If that term existed before 2001 or 2002, it certainly wasn’t the standard name for free online scholarship. But there were examples of free online scholarship, some dating back to 1987. In the May 2001 Cites & Insights, I explored the question: “Do free scholarly electronic journals last?”
The title of that essay, Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm, revealed one finding I had suspected going in: It was not unusual for one of these pioneering efforts to start out with a bang, fueled by the enthusiasm of its founders, and fade away in an “arc of enthusiasm,” with articles and the journal itself disappearing after a few years.
In the course of the 2001 essay, I casually asserted a definition that’s been cited elsewhere: If a journal lasts at least six years, it can be considered a “lasting” title even if it later goes out of business. More than half of the open access journals founded in 1995 or before that were refereed and “visible” (see below) were still publishing six years later; that’s a good record. I thought it would be interesting to see how they’re doing after five more years. Thus, this update....
[Walt ends Part I by classifying 83 journals from the ARL Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists for 1995 as Special Cases (3), Oddities (3), Arc of Enthusiasm (14), Ceased Pioneers (11), and Surviving Pioneers (52). In Part II he lists 189 additional journals missing from the ARL Directory but included in the DOAJ with launch dates of 1995 or earlier.]
Add it up and we see that at least 121 and possibly as many as 184 journals publishing refereed scholarly articles and reviews were available in OA form in 1995 (some years earlier) and lasted at least a decade, showing articles at least through 2004.
How many free online journals came and went between 1995 and 2004? It would be delightful to say that the mortality rate was only 13%: the 25 ceased journals in Part I and the three in Part II, out of the maximum plausible number for 1995 (66 in Part I, 147 in part II). But that benign picture is certainly far too optimistic.
The oldest surviving scholarly ejournal I’m aware of, New Horizons in Adult Education, began in 1987. Thus, this year marks two decades of sustaining free ejournal publishing. It would be fascinating and, I believe, worthwhile to try to track the ejournal landscape through the first of those two decades --or, more realistically, to see what emerged during the first decade (1987-1996) and what happened to those early ejournals. But that’s another story.
Comment. This is the best work to date on the early history of OA journals and should be the point of departure for future histories.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/21/2006 11:05:00 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.
