Open Access Publishing

Open access refers to business models where a publisher provides free access on the public Internet to works that are created with no expectation of direct monetary return. Most scholarly journal articles fit this definition. Open access does not include materials that authors typically expect to make money on like textbooks, most monographs, music, multimedia, etc. There are many different business models that result in open access.

Although costs for digital publishing are lower overall than for print publications, open-access publishing is not free. One alternative funding model is to recover the costs of publication up front, generally through author charges. These charges can be paid from grants, since publication is a natural conclusion to funded research; funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of traditional subscription journals; or endowments set up by discipline or institution. Production costs can also be offset by the sale of add-ons and enhanced services.

Open access does not mean that peer review is bypassed. Peer review is medium-independent, as relevant to online journals as to print journals. It can be carried out in cost efficient ways with new supporting software and technologies.

Open access publishing has the potential to have the greatest impact in the scientific, technical, and medical fields where journal prices have increased the most and where a significant amount of research is government sponsored. In the sciences, the campaign to convert publishing to open access has produced notable successes with potentially profound implications for the journal publishing industry. Early in 2008 came the long-awaited strengthened mandate requiring the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide open access to grantees' peer-reviewed research articles within 12 months of publication. Soon after, the European Research Council announced the first European Union (EU)–wide mandate, calling for grant recipients to put research articles and supporting data on the web within six months of publication. Immediately following, 791 universities in 46 European countries voted unanimously to endorse OA mandates for faculty at their institutions and to support other mandates for access to publicly funded research. (Source: Library Journal)

Two other open access journal publishing models, both based on author charges, are the Public Library of Science (PloS) and BioMed Central.

The Public Knowledge Project provide open source software and to help make it possible to publish low cost scholarly journals, which supports societies, institutions and individual faculty in providing open access journals, conference proceeding and soon monographs as well.

Keeping Informed:

Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
An open access blog (weblog) updated daily, this is the primary resource for current news and opinions on the topic of open access.