... The Public Library of Science has become a very high-impact, very respected journal publisher. It's at the highest levels of scientific quality. And their business model is still developing. And I think that their new PLoS ONE venture, which is a new online only thing, and their upcoming hubs work which is going to build communities, those are going to be really interesting things to watch.
In terms of sort of proving itself from a business perspective, BioMed Central, who has nearly 250 journals, I believe, under Creative Commons licenses, was sold in December to Springer. My understanding is that BMC's annual revenues were in the 15 million pounds per year range. Again, not using any sort of copyright transfer when they were bought by Springer. And so that really was, I think, a vindication of the capability of a for-profit model that was open. And I love to point to Hindawi, which is in Egypt, which is also profitable, which has another few hundred journals under C.C. by license. So we're certainly seeing some proof points that this can be high-quality and this can be profitable. But there's still a lot of uncertainty as to how the existing journals adapt to that. ...
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.
