Open Access News

Archana Venkatraman, Open access joins the mainstream, Information World Review, April 3, 2009.  Excerpt:

For over a decade now, open access (OA) publishing has been making inroads into the information industry, especially in the scientific, technical and medical (STM) sector. Even traditional publishers, who once shied away from OA, today embrace it, while OA enthusiasts insist the publishing model is no longer an experiment but a mainstream option for all information sectors....

OA is already the default publishing choice for many researchers within fields from genomics to computational biology.

The March issue of IWR reported on a study funded by JISC, led by professors John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim, which suggested that the OA model could help save costs, which is an even greater concern than usual amid an economic crisis.

And another study, from Germany this time, showed that the number of articles with German authors in BioMed Central (BMC) journals had been steadily rising: from 538 in 2005 to 882 by October 2008. “That is a clear indication that open access is becoming more and more accepted,” says Neil Jacobs, programme manager at JISC. “I’m sure you could do a similar search for authors with other nationalities and get very similar results.” ...

After some initial wariness, many academic societies have realised that OA can offer a secure and sustainable financial model for publishing their journals.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG), a division of Macmillan, introduced OA options on journals more than two years ago. In January this year, it expanded its OA choices for authors, through both self-archiving and author-pays publication routes.

Continuing its support for open access self-archiving on high-impact journals, NPG has extended its manuscript deposition service to a further 43 journals to help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates for public access. Another 28 society and academic journals published by NPG now offer a manuscript deposition service to authors of original research articles.

Only last month, NPG, along with the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) introduced EJHG Open to give authors from the European Journal of Human Genetics (EJHG) the option of immediate open access on publication. This includes deposition of the final published version in PubMed Central....

David Hoole, head of content licensing at NPG, says: “We have investigated evolving the business models for these journals, including the hybrid subscription/OA model, and a full transition to the OA model based on publication charges, and we are confident that these models are sustainable on these titles.

“Wherever it is possible, NPG thinks it is right to give authors the choice to make their article OA, whether through self-archiving or through OA publication. A business model based on current levels of publication charges still doesn’t work on high-impact, high-circulation journals such as Nature and the Nature-branded titles. In these cases self-archiving provides an alternative solution.”

NPG has been at the forefront of traditional publishers encouraging self-archiving. In 2002, it became one of the first subscription publishers to stop requiring authors to transfer copyright, moving to an exclusive licence to publish.  “We already help hundreds of authors to self-archive in PubMed Central, and we are working to extend this service to other archives,” adds Hoole.

NPG is considering ways of facilitating the reuse of self-archived manuscripts, specifically to support the growing field of text-mining....

At the time [when Springer bought BMC], Derk Haank, Springer’s CEO, said: “This acquisition reinforces the fact that we see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing.”

The BMC series of journals recently published its 20,000th peer-reviewed article, and receives more than 1,000 article submissions a month. BMC’s publisher Matthew Cockerill says: “I think the acquisition helped to increase awareness in the information industry that open access is no longer just an experiment, it is a real business.”

According to BMC, the most striking trend is the rising number of established journals moving to OA with BMC. “Often these journals already have impact factors, which gives them a real head start, and we have seen such journals go from strength to strength under the OA model,” says Cockerill.

Some libraries are also beginning to consider the option of hosting open access services for authors who insist on it, says Caroline Sutton of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association (OASPA), a body launched last October to represent the interests of OA journals publishers globally....

Researchers, publishers, funders and even taxpayers can all benefit from OA model. Because OA offers easy and broader access to scholarly works, it increases general awareness, offers a rich reference material for researchers and journals, triggers supplementary or follow-up research works and provides a more cost-effective system that makes better use of the taxes.

Cockerill sums it up like this: “Subscription-based models tend to limit the free flow of ideas and data, constraining them in silos, while open access helps to bring the different areas together.”

Hoole adds that the benefits of OA for authors are a wider range of publication options, with multiple routes to compliance with funder and institutional mandates.

“But [the rise of OA] certainly does not mean the end of subscriptions,” says Cockerill. BMC sees an important role for publishers as providers of value-added content to subscribers. It publishes many journals which include additional subscriber-only content (reviews, commentaries, and so on) alongside OA research....

There are concerns about a transition to OA and the practicalities of administering an OA-based system, collecting publication charges economically, ensuring clarity about any relation between publication charges and subscription rates. JISC is keen to work with publishers, universities and others to ensure these practical issues are addressed.

Sutton says OASPA has moved on from focusing on the acceptance of OA to the funding aspect of OA: how to convince institutions of its cost-saving benefits, and so on. She concludes: “Let’s not sensationalise OA, but work on it realistically and see it move beyond the realms of medicine and STM to a vast spectrum of the information industry such as libraries, social sciences and even humanities, which have been a slightly reluctant about it until now.”