AccessEcon is a new OA portal for the field of economics, launched January 1, 2009. (Thanks to Mike Carroll.) From the home page:
AccessEcon is an outgrowth of software written in 1999 and 2000 to support the publication of the Economics Bulletin, an open-access online journal meant to compete with the Elsevier Publication: Economics Letters. EB has been more successful than we ever would have imagined and had over 1000 submissions in 2008. In 2005 and 2006 we began to adapt this software to help us organize the Public Economic Theory meetings and soon realized that it was possible to go further to create a general tool that would allow us to host open access journal, editorial back offices for paper-based journals, working paper series and provide turnkey conference organization interfaces. Since our objective is to return scholarship to scholars, we offer it as a free service to qualified members and groups in the economics research community. If you are interested, please contact John P. Conley or Myrna Wooders for more information.
In the...paper-centered era before 2000, commercial publishers served a useful and necessary purpose. In the electronic era, post 2000, the academy has very little to gain from commercial publishers who may actually impede rather than facilitate scholarly communication. It seems to us to be ridiculous that we as scholars write, referee, and edit economic research, give it away to commercial publishers, and then buy it back through our libraries at enormous prices.
The mission of the AccessEcon is to foster free and rapid scientific communication across the entire community of research economists. Specifically, AccessEcon is a sophisticated web-based workflow and content management tool that makes it possible to publish electronic journals, run editorial offices, publish working paper series, and organize conferences....
As economists, you should be asking: why is “free” a sensible business model? There are several reasons. First, our purpose in writing this software to begin with was to support JPET, APET, and EB. Thus, we would have incurred the fixed cost of creating this software in any event. There are very few additional fixed costs to recover. Second, the marginal cost of allowing others to use the system is very close to zero. We are good enough public economists to know that the efficient price is zero in this case. The only marginal costs to us are the time it takes to help get others started on the system. This is the reason for the “mutual support” condition. Third, after careful reflection, we realized that we simply are not business people. The cost in terms of time away from research of shilling, billing and advertising is just not worth the potential financial benefit. To mangle the old joke about arbitrage: if there are five dollar bills lying on the ground it must cost ten dollars to pick them up. Finally, because of our experience at JPET and EB, we sincerely want open-access to spread as rapidly and widely as possible, especially in economics. To nickel and dime people who share this vision seems completely self-defeating....
Also see the co-founders' undated article (apparently a preprint), providing more of the background and rationale. Excerpt:
Our conclusion is that, in the electronic era, open-access electronic journals have an overwhelming cost advantage over commercial publishers. In addition, open-access is consistent with our mission as scholars to increase and spread knowledge and also feeds our personal and professional interests much more directly. However, we are still largely living with the system of scholarly communication we inherited from the papyrocentric era. This system will not go quietly into the night. Commercial publishers will do their best to hang on to and exploit this inherited capital as long as they can.
As individual scholars, we will continue to act in our own self-interest and so will try to place our research in the most reputable journal we can. Whether this location is an open-access journal, a cheaper society journal, or an expensive commercial journal will play little role in this decision. There is no reason to complain about this, and very little that can be done to change it.
What we can do is undertake the hard work of creating credible open-access alternatives. Creating such alternatives means finding areas that are not well served by the current set of commercial journals, enlisting the support of leaders in these research areas, and then building communities around these new journals. The incentives are there for entrepreneurial editors to do so. With AccessEcon and other electronic workflow/content-management tools available, the financial barriers to entry are close to zero.
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.
