Back in June 2008 we learned that Computational Linguistics would convert to OA with the first issue in 2009. Here are the editor's reflections on the conversion, in the last issue of 2008:
...At the time of writing, the vast bulk of scholarly literature is not open access....There is an increasingly widely held view that this is just not right. Given that almost all the research published in scholarly journals is paid for by the taxpayer, it's reasonable to ask what justification there can be for restricting public access to this research by requiring that a further payment be made to read about it. And 'toll access', as it is sometimes called, is not only bad for the reading public; it has been frequently argued that it is bad for authors too, because any barriers to access may decrease the likelihood of citation and the general impact of the reported work.
So...Computational Linguistics will become an open access journal as of the first issue of 2009. In fact, for some time the journal has had a rather unusual access status, whereby its content becomes freely available as part of the online ACL [Association for Computational Linguistics] Anthology one year after publication. As of the first issue of Volume 35, even this delay will be removed, with the journal's contents being freely available as soon as they are published.
2. Why Electronic-only?
That the journal is going electronic-only and open access at the same time are not unrelated events. Print publication is a major part of the cost of producing the journal, and this is a cost that is very considerably subsidized by the revenues generated by institutional subscriptions. Going open access means that institutions no longer pay these subscriptions, and so we need a sustainable financial model that does not depend on this income. Ceasing the production of the printed version of the journal is an important step in that direction. In an environmentally conscious age, it also has the additional benefit of removing the need to fly, four times a year, small plastic-wrapped wads of paper to two thousand ACL members around the world....
This is not to say that going electronic-only makes the journal free of production costs. Although the journal's editor, editorial board, and external reviewers provide their labor free of charge, it still costs real money to produce the journal: In particular, CL will continue to use the professional services of the MIT Press in managing the high standards of copyediting and typesetting to which our readers have become accustomed. For the foreseeable future at least, these costs will continue to be met by the ACL, as owner of the journal.
3. What Else is Changing?
The shift to electronic publication means that publishing an article in Computational Linguistics should be considerably faster than before, for a number of reasons. Under the old model, it can take up to six months from the time that the editorial office dispatches the author's final copy of an article to the publisher, to the time the article appears in print. Around half of this time is taken up by the print production process. The delay is further exacerbated by the fact that the first article that is ready for an issue has to wait until the remainder of the issue is ready before it can be published. By moving to electronic-only publication, articles will now appear online as soon as they have gone through the copy-editing process, on an article-by-article basis. You'll be able to access articles even before they have completed the copy-editing cycle. This, in fact, is not a new thing: for the last year or so, we have been publishing...the proofs that are sent to the authors for checking before final edits are made...via the MIT Press Web site under the label 'Early Access'. But the unavailability of an easy way to let individual subscribers see this toll-access content meant that very few people were aware of its existence. With the move to open access, the Early Access articles will also be freely available to all.
Another consequence of being electronic-only is that there will be no artificial backlog resulting from the page limits imposed by physical print production....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/26/2009 01:36:00 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.
