Open Access News

• Iain Stevenson, Guest Editorial
• Blaise Cronin and Kathryn La Barre, Mickey Mouse and Milton: book publishing in the humanities
• Ulrich Pöschl, Interactive journal concept for improved scientific publishing and quality assurance
• Mark Ware, Institutional repositories and scholarly publishing
• Peter Banks, Open access: a medical association perspective
• Christine Lamb, Open access publishing models: opportunity or threat to scholarly and academic publishers?
• Chris Awre, The JISC's FAIR Programme: disclosing and sharing institutional assets (PS: Now available in an OA edition)
• Peter Gregory, Personal View

Summary from the press release: "It is in our interest as publishers to satisfy the needs of our authors, readers and institutional customers to the best of our ability; this entails paying close attention to what these communities are saying, and collaborating with them to develop new approaches as need arises. Scholarship-friendly publishers maximise access to and use of content; we also maximise its quality and, thus, prestige. It goes without saying that --by one business model or another-- publishers need to make enough money not just to cover our costs, but also to satisfy the needs of our business, and to continue to support the activities to which publishing income may contribute. However, we recognise that institutions' funds are increasingly inadequate to purchase all the information required by users, and we welcome collaboration with our customers to find new approaches which might solve this dilemma." Excerpts from the principles themselves:

1.1.2 Posting of final version. Our survey shows that over 60% of publishers allow authors to post the final, published version of their article on websites or repositories, some even providing the PDF for this purpose. Although some speculate that increasing use of OAI-compliant metadata will ultimately enable such posting to undermine subscription and licence income, this does not seem to be the case so far.

1.2 Dissemination by the publisher. Maximising access to authors' work is good for the publisher as well as the author, provided it does not undermine the publisher's financial model. Most publishers are finding a variety of ways to make more content available to more people.

1.2.4 Archival access. Publishers have a variety of models for providing access to their online back-files....If the timing is carefully chosen (it may differ between disciplines), it appears that [free online access] need not undermine sales.

1.2.6 Open Access journals. Making journals completely free to readers everywhere in the world is an appealing idea and one which is in tune with the mission of many learned societies, although it is of course necessary to assure that costs are adequately covered, for example by authors, institutions, or funding agencies; there is a growing number of Open Access journals, many of them experimental. Not all publishers will feel able to take this route, but all will be interested to learn from the findings of the pioneers.

2.2 Citation. ...There is early evidence that widespread online access increases citations --thus it would seem to follow that Open Access journals might prove in time be the mostly highly cited of all.

1. Kate Worlock, Will open access prove a blessing or a curse to learned societies?
2. Andrew Odlyzko, Why electronic publishing means people will pay different prices

Decisions to edit and publish manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals should be based on characteristics of the manuscripts themselves and how they relate to the journal's purposes and readers. Among these characteristics are importance of the topic, originality, scientific strength, clarity and completeness of written expression, and potential interest to readers. Editors should also take into account whether studies are ethical and whether their publication might cause harm to readers or to the public interest.

Editorial decisions should not be affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors. Decisions to edit and publish should not be determined by the policies of governments or other agencies outside of the journal itself.

Editors should defend this principle, as they do other principles of sound editorial practice, and enlist their colleagues' support in this effort if necessary.

What happened was precisely the reverse of what the publisher expected. Instead of lost sales, the sales of the book shot up. In the few weeks since the text went online, more copies of this book left our warehouse than during the whole of the last decade. Omnipotent Government is now a top seller in the Mises.org catalog. The publisher obtained not only the leasing fee from our offices but suddenly enjoyed a flood of new orders for the book from us.

(PS: Mabe is the Director of Academic Relations at Elsevier. My short reply: the rationale of OA is to make research available to all who can make use of it. It's irrelevant to point out that some people have no use for it. As for the highly-evolved business model of subscription-based journals: after long, painful, firsthand experience, universities are disagreeing. In January, the University of California Academic Senate called it "incontrovertibly unsustainable".)