It’s over two years since Oxford Journals began experimenting with open access....
In July we marked the first full year of our optional Oxford Open model. Launched in July 2005, it gives authors the possibility of paying for their research to be made freely available online immediately upon publication in the participating journals. 49 journals are participating at present, across a wide range of subject areas.
The majority of interest in the first year has been in the life sciences, with ~10% of authors selecting the open access option across the 16 participating journals in this area, compared with ~5% in medicine and public health, and ~3% in the humanities and social sciences (equating to 4 open access papers in total). A few life science titles (Bioinformatics, Carcinogenesis, and Human Molecular Genetics) have seen up to 20% uptake. The highest of these was for Bioinformatics, which has published over 80 open access papers in 2006. In recognition of this, the 2007 subscription prices for these journals have been adjusted to reflect the expected proportion of open access content in the future....
For libraries then, the likelihood, in the short term at least, is that a subscription model will continue to operate for a large part of our journal content, both for areas where open access is not taken up, and where extra content and functionality beyond primary research is on offer....
In June we presented the results from three separate studies into the effects of open access on our authors, usage, and citations. Some of the key results included the finding that immediate open access does seem to help increase usage, and may even have knock-on benefits to other subscription content, with an increase in downloads of subscription articles published in the same journal issue as open access content. However, the report also concluded that the increase in usage of open access journals is not as high as may have been expected, in fact there is strong evidence to suggest there are several factors driving up online usage, including search engines; open access may be just a small factor. A full report on the findings is available to download from the Oxford Journals website....
PS: Thanks to William Walsh for alerting me to this article and for correcting Gedye's use of the misleading term "author pays".
Update (1/8/07). Also see Gedye's "Open Access: Walking the Talk," Against the Grain, November 2006. It appears to be another summary of Oxford's OA experiments, but this one is accessible only to subscribers, at least so far.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/15/2006 10:56:00 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.
