Open Access Journals - The Gold Route to Open Access

Francis JayakanthNational Centre for Science Information

Indian Institute of ScienceBangalore – 560 012

franc@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in

Scientific Journals

• A scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research

• Most journals are highly specialized, although some of the oldest journals such as Nature publish articles and scientific papers across a wide range of scientific fields

• Scientific journals contain articles that have been peer reviewed, in an attempt to ensure that articles meet the journal's standards of quality, and scientific validity

A History of 300 Years!

• The first scientific journal: Journal des savants, published on 5th January 1665

• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, was first published on 6 March 1665, is being published to date

From 1950s

• Increased amount of science

• Increased number of publications

• The amount of research results getting to large for the scientific societies

• Commercial publishers start interfering with the publishing market

• Commercial publishers identify new subject areas and start new journals

Serials Crisis

• The term serials crisis has become common shorthand for the runaway cost increases of many scholarly journals

• the cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available to the libraries are reducing or at best, remains constant

Solutions, Alternatives and Developments

• Interlibrary loan

• Pay-per-view

• Cancellation of subscriptions

• Consortium-based subscription

• supporting journals that use other publishing models, such as Open Access Journal

Open Access Journals

• Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available to the reader "without financial or other barrier other than access to the internet itself."

• Open access journals (also called the "gold road to open access") is one of the two general methods for providing open access. The other one (also called the "green road") is self-archiving in a repository

• The publisher of an open Access journal is known as an open access publisher, and the process, open access publishing

Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)

• The Budapest Open Access Initiative arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet

Economic Models for OA Journals

• Authors pay

• Funding agencies or Institutions pay

• Advertising

Author Pays Model

• Two well-known open access publishers who follow this model are:– BioMed Central– PLoS (Public Library of Science)

BioMed Central

• BMC is a open access publisher in the area of STM

• As of 06 Jan’09, 197 open access journals are being published

• Facilitates hosting of new OA journals and/or converting existing journals to OA journals

BioMed Central (2)

• Standard Article processing charge (APC) : USD 1380

• Several of the BMC journals do not levy APC

• Individual APC waiver requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis

• Recently launched, Open Repository, a hosted institutional repository service

PLoS

• PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource

• Publishes seven peer reviewed OA journals

• Average APC: USD 2000

Bioline International

• Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries

Bioline International (2)

• currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuel

1. Medknow Publications

• Provides publishing solutions for the scientific community

• For the present, 77 peer reviewed titles are being hosted

• Revenue through advertisements and print subscription

• Print subscription continues to be popular

2. Indian Medlars Centre

• One point resource of peer reviewed Indian biomedical literature covering full text of IndMED journals

• No. of titles to date: 40

3. Indian Academy of Sciences

• No. of titles: 11• Revenue through

advertisements and print subscription

• Print subscription continues to be popular

Directory of Open Access Journals

• This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals

• There are now 3812 journals in the directory. Currently 1342 journals are searchable at article level

Indian Initiatives in DoAJ

Open-source Journal Management Software

References

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_journal

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis

• http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

• http://www.searchguide.se/oa/eng/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/bakgrund_oa-tidskrifter_eng.ppt