Our mission is to diffuse physics knowledge but we also have to be able to stay in business and continue to serve the physics community. Open access is one of the biggest issues now. We have to try out different means of publishing and see what works for our different communities.
We are approaching open access in two ways. The first is the hybrid model. Our ‘Author Select’ option is now offered on all subscription titles. This has not really had a high uptake so far and if we were only looking at the uptake it could be deemed a failure. However, having this author-choice option does not disrupt the traditional model, but it gives those with a funding requirement to make their work open access an opportunity to do so. People who don’t want it don’t have to take it. It has been a good way to gauge the reaction to open access.
The other model is Biomicrofluidics, our new fully open-access, online-only journal. This is the first in a series; our plan is to launch more fully open-access titles. Although this journal is just starting, the response so far has been good. The biomicrofluidics community is smaller than the general physics communities but there is interest and we will probably know more about how it is going in six months or so. Open access is good for interdisciplinary titles such as this one. Being open access enables anyone to look at the full text. If this was a subscription title it might not be high on the list of priorities for subject-specific librarians because only a few researchers from their disciplines might be involved in this area....
What is AIP’s view of author self-archiving?
Our copyright policy allows authors to post the final PDFs of their articles on their own websites or the post-print versions on their employer’s website or institutional repository. Our main requirement with archiving is just that authors can’t charge for people to access their copies of the articles. We also have a policy to help authors to comply with funding-body requirements such as those from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/28/2006 06:03:00 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.
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.
