Open access journal
Open access (OA) journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the reader "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."[1] They remove price barriers (e.g. subscription, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and most permission barriers (e.g. copyright and licensing restrictions).[1] While open access journals are freely available to the reader, there are still costs associated with the publication and production of such journals. Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author.[1]
Some open access journals are subsidized and are financed by an academic institution, learned society or a government information center. Others are financed by payment of article processing charges by submitting authors, money typically made available to researchers by their institution or funding agency.[2] Sometimes these two are referred to respectively as "gold" and "platinum" models to emphasize their distinction,[3][4] although other times "gold" OA is used to refer to both paid and unpaid OA.[5]
In 2009, there were approximately 4,800 active open access journals, publishing around 190,000 articles.[6] As of October 2015, this had increased to over 10,000 open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals,[7] though this number has fallen to 9,500 in January 2017. A study of random journals from the citations indexes AHSCI, SCI and SSCI in 2013 came to the result that 88% of the journals were closed access and 12% were open access.[8]
Openness
There are several varieties of open access journals, including full open access journals with all content open access; hybrid open access journals where only some of the content is open access;[9] and delayed open access journals where the content is made open access after a delay (e.g. 12 or 24 months). Open access journals are one of the two general methods for providing open access. The other one (sometimes called the "green road to open access," as opposed to the "gold road" above) is self-archiving in a repository.[10] The publisher of an open access journal is known as an "open access publisher", and the process, "open access publishing".
History
Financing open access journals
Open access journals divide into those that charge publication fees and those that do not.
Fee-based open access journals
Open access journals in which the author is responsible for the associate publication costs are commonly known as gold open access journals [11][12]. The money might come from the author but more often comes from the author's research grant or employer. In cases of economic hardship, many journals will waive all or part of the fee. (This includes instances where the authors come from a less developed economy). Journals charging publication fees normally take various steps to ensure that editors conducting peer review do not know whether authors have requested, or been granted, fee waivers, or to ensure that every paper is approved by an independent editor with no financial stake in the journal. While the payments are often incurred per article published (e.g. BMC journals or PLOS ONE), there are some journals that apply them per manuscript submitted (e.g. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics) or per author (PeerJ). A 2013 study found that only 28% of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) required payment by the authors; however, this figure was higher in journals with a scientific or medical focus (43% and 47% respectively), and lowest in journals publishing in the arts and humanities (0% and 4% respectively).[13]
No-fee open access journals
No-fee open access journals, also known as platinum open access journal (and sometimes diamond open access journals),[11][12] use a variety of business models. As summarized by Peter Suber:[14] "Some no-fee OA journals have direct or indirect subsidies from institutions like universities, laboratories, research centers, libraries, hospitals, museums, learned societies, foundations, or government agencies. Some have revenue from a separate line of non-OA publications. Some have revenue from advertising, auxiliary services, membership dues, endowments, reprints, or a print or premium edition. Some rely, more than other journals, on volunteerism. Some undoubtedly use a combination of these means".
Current problems and projects
Identifying open access journals
There are several major directories of open access journals, most notably Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).[15] Each has its special standards for what journals are included. A list of possibly predatory open access publishing also exists.
Articles in the major open access journals are included in the standard bibliographic databases for their subject, such as PubMed. Those established long enough to have an impact factor, and otherwise qualified, are in Web of Science and Scopus. DOAJ includes indexing for the individual articles in some but not all of the many journals it includes.
Lack of diversity
Open access does not mean there is access is equal to all. Some people have difficulties accessing the internet and, thus, the articles, but there is also inequality in terms of what is published and by whom.[16] The lack of diversity in academia and research, in reviewers and publishers, and in librarians (those who help others find sources) leads to many people's voices being unheard.[17]
New initiatives
Pioneers in open access publishing in the biomedical domain were journals like the BMJ, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Medscape, who were created or made their content freely accessible in the late 90s.[18] BioMed Central, a for-profit publisher with now dozens of open access journals, published its first article in the year 2000.[19] PLOS launched its first open access journal, PLOS Biology in 2003, with PLOS Medicine following in 2004, and PLOS One in 2006.[19]
Technology
In 1998, several universities founded the Public Knowledge Project to foster open access, and developed the open-source journal publishing system Open Journal Systems, among other scholarly software projects. As of 2010, it was being used by approximately 5,000 journals worldwide.[20]
See also
- Open access
- Copyright policies of academic publishers
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- List of open access journals (Category)
- Mega journal
- Open access mandate
- Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
- Overlay journal
- Predatory open access publishing
- Software platforms to run open access journals
References
- ^ a b c Suber, Peter. "Open Access Overview". Retrieved November 29, 2014.
- ^ Suber, Peter (2012). Open access. MIT Press. pp. 138–139. ISBN 9780262517638.
- ^ Machovec, George (2013). "An Interview with Jeffrey Beall on Open Access Publishing". The Charleston Advisor. 15: 50–50. doi:10.5260/chara.15.1.50.
- ^ Öchsner, A. (2013). "Publishing Companies, Publishing Fees, and Open Access Journals". Introduction to Scientific Publishing. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. p. 23. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38646-6_4. ISBN 978-3-642-38645-9.
- ^ Harris, Siân (August 2012). "Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries" (PDF). Sage Publications. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
- ^ Björk, Bo-Christer (2011). "A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 13 (4): e115. doi:10.2196/jmir.1802. ISSN 1438-8871.
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: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ^ "Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)". DOAJ. Retrieved October 20, 2015.
- ^ Fuchs, Christian; Marisol Sandoval (2013). "The diamond model of open access publishing: why policy makers, scholars, universities, libraries, labour unions and the publishing world need to take non-commercial, non-profit open access serious". tripleC. 11 (2). ISSN 1726-670X.
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(help) - ^ Eve, Martin (2014). Open access and the humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 9–10. ISBN 9781107484016.
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- ^ a b Christian Fuchs, and Marisol Sandoval The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious, Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, vol. 11 (2013), no. 2
- ^ a b Srećko Gajović Diamond Open Access in the quest for interdisciplinarity and excellence, Croatian Medical Journal vol. 58 (2017), no. 4, pp. 261-261
- ^ Kozak, Marcin; Hartley, James (December 2013). "Publication fees for open access journals: Different disciplines-different methods". Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology. 64 (12): 2591–2594. doi:10.1002/asi.22972. Retrieved November 29, 2014.
- ^ Suber, Peter (November 2, 2006). "No-fee open-access journals". SPARC open access Newsletter.
- ^ Marchitelli, Andrea; Galimberti, Paola; Bollini, Andrea; Mitchell, Dominic (2017). "Helping journals to improve their publishing standards: a data analysis of DOAJ new criteria effects". JLIS.it. 8 (1): 1–21. doi:10.4403/jlis.it-12052. Retrieved January 27, 2017.
- ^ Hathcock, April (February 8, 2016). "Open But Not Equal: Open Scholarship for Social Justice". At The Intersection. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
- ^ Roh, Charlotte (February 1, 2016). "Library publishing and diversity values: Changing scholarly publishing through policy and scholarly communication education". College & Research Libraries News. 77 (2): 82–85. doi:10.5860/crln.77.2.9446.
- ^ Eysenbach, Gunther (May 15, 2006). "The Open Access Advantage". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 8 (2): e8. doi:10.2196/jmir.8.2.e8.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ^ a b Suber, Peter (February 9, 2009). "Open-Access Timeline". legacy.earlham.edu. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
- ^ Edgar, Brian D.; Willinsky, John (June 14, 2010). "A survey of scholarly journals using open journal systems". Scholarly and Research Communication. 1 (2). ISSN 1923-0702.
Further reading
- OA journal business models. A community-edited list at the Open Access Directory. OCLC 757073363. 2008-
- Okerson, Ann; O'Donnell, James (Eds.) (June 1995). Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries. ISBN 0-918006-26-0..
- Willinsky, John (2006). The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (PDF). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262512664.
- Bergstrom, Theodore C.; Carl T. Bergstrom (May 2, 2004). "Will open access compete away monopoly profits in journal publishing?" (PDF). Retrieved July 20, 2008.
- "Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications" (PDF). United Kingdom: Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings. 2012. Retrieved July 15, 2012.
- In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing
- Why A Fake Article Titled "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?" Was Accepted By 17 Medical Journals. "A Harvard scientist wanted to see exactly how easy it is to get medical research published. In some cases, $500 is pretty much all it takes." By Elizabeth Segran, Fast Company (magazine)
- Glyn Moody (June 17, 2016). "Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can't everybody access it?". Ars Technica. Retrieved June 20, 2016.