Open Access Journals

Status Report 2007

Peter Suber:

"Gold OA, or peer-reviewed OA journals, also put down deeper roots in 2007, entirely apart from the launch of individual new OA journals. Canada (through the Social Science and Humanities Research Council) used public funds to support OA journals. Germany (through the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and the Scandinavian countries (through Nordbib) used public funds to launch new OA journals and convert existing toll-access (TA) journals to OA. Five individual experiments at CERN, which already operated under a green OA mandate, encouraged their researchers to submit new work to OA journals. INASP and the Lund University Library joined forces to raise the visibility of OA journals published by developing countries.

The European Research Council agreed to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute extended its existing policy to cover fees at hybrid OA journals. The CNRS' Institut de physique nucléaire et de physique des particules (IN2P3) agreed to pay the publication fees for French physicists who publish in the OA Journal of High Energy Physics. These funder policies were welcome but not fundamentally new. By contrast, universities began launching funds expressly to help faculty members pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The Universities of Amsterdam, Nottingham, and Wisconsin all launched OA journal funds in 2007. Texas A&M University announced its willingness to help faculty pay publication fees even without a central OA fund. The Research Councils UK made it easier for UK universities to launch such funds by offering to reimburse them, at least in part, for their payments.

By my conservative count, based on what crossed my desk, 65 journals converted from TA to OA in 2007, more than twice the number as in 2006 and probably twice the number from all previous years combined. Smaller numbers converted from TA to hybrid OA, from hybrid OA to full OA, and from fee-based OA to no-fee OA. Hindawi converted its last two TA journals to OA and became an OA-only publisher. (Is it a coincidence that a few months later it reported that its submissions were up 70% over the previous year?)

CERN's SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) made steady and inspiring progress toward the goal of converting all the major journals in particle physics to OA by redirecting the flow of subscription funds. The coalition has now recruited members from Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US. The Mellon Foundation announced its willingness to fund a study of massive redirection projects designed to support OA journals.

Sage launched its first line of full OA journals, after teaming up with Hindawi, and after their merger Wiley and Blackwell launched the first full OA journal for either company. Bentham Science Publishers announced an ambitious program to launch 300 OA journals before the end of 2007, a goal it later revised to 200. In late December 2007 it had Web sites for 166 new OA journals at different stages of development. The year also saw new OA-oriented start-ups in Birchley Hall Press, Co-Action Publishing, Marquette Books, Merlien, and Pabst Science Publishers.

The DOAJ launched a membership program, improving its prospects for longevity. Its institutional parent, Lund University, launched a companion service to DOAJ called Journal Info, to help scholars evaluate journals where they might submit their work. For non-OA journals, it recommends OA alternatives and indicates the journal's self-archiving policy, subscription price per article, and subscription price per citation. A group of scientists launched Eureka Science Journal Watch, a wiki to collect information about OA and TA journals and to organize strategies to expand OA. A group of Spanish researchers launched SCImago, an OA database of journal data organized by field and country, supporting flexible queries and its own journal rank measurement. JISC and the University of Glasgow launched OpenLOCKSS, a LOCKSS-based preservation system specifically for OA journals.

We learned more about the existing range of OA journals, sometimes contrary to prevailing wisdom. Harvesting data from the DOAJ, Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral researcher in cell and molecular biology at Shriner's Hospital for Children, not only updated a 2005 study on the predominance of no-fee over fee-based OA journals, but surveyed the full DOAJ, not just a sample. He found that 67% of full OA journals in the DOAJ charged no publication fees, 18% charged fees, and 15% didn't make it easy for the DOAJ to find out. (Kaufman and Wills had found in October 2005 that 52.8% of sampled OA journals charged no publication fees.) Caroline Sutton and I found 427 societies publishing 496 full OA journals, and 19 societies publishing 74 hybrid OA journals, challenging the widespread belief that society publishers, as such, feel threatened by gold OA. (These numbers update those we published in the November 2007 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.) We also found that most society OA journals, like most OA journals overall, charged no publication fees. But the no-fee society OA journals form a much larger majority (83.3%) than the no-fee OA journals overall (52.8% for Kaufman-Wills two years ago, 67% for Hooker last month)." (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110)

Hybrid open access journals:

"The hybrid OA journal model, publishing both OA and non-OA articles in the same journal and generally charging a publication fee for the OA articles, expanded in 2007, but much more slowly than in 2006. WorldSciNet adopted the model for all 133 journals published by WorldScientific and all eight journals published by Imperial College Press; Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers adopted the model for eight of its journals; the American Physiological Society for 10 of its journals; Professional Engineering Publishing for all 19 of its journals; the American Geophysical Union for the majority of its 19 journals; and the ALPSP adopted it for its journal, Learned Publishing. Taylor & Francis added 31 journals to its hybrid OA journal program. Emerald launched an unusual (but not unprecedented) no-fee hybrid program for its engineering journals.

Oxford's hybrid OA Journal of Experimental Botany waived its publication fee for authors from subscribing institutions. Springer struck a deal with the Dutch library consortium UKB (Universiteitsbibliotheken en de Koninklijke Bibliotheek), and later with the University of Göttingen, under which current subscription payments are considered to cover publication fees for affiliated authors. These experiments show that the hybrid model is still evolving, and that there's room for creative ways to reduce publication fees for subscribing institutions or to reduce the likelihood of cancellations.

As the model matured, it began to show some ups and downs. For the second year in a row, Oxford reduced the subscription prices on a batch of its hybrid journals (this year, 28) to reflect the growing number of authors who paid for the OA option. The Royal Society also reduced its publication fees. Blackwell stopped describing its hybrid program as an experiment. The American Society of Animal Science converted the Journal of Animal Science (JAS) to a hybrid OA journal, but JAS Editor Larry Reynolds wrote an editorial against the move. Peter Murray-Rust, a Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University, discovered that Oxford, Ingenta, and the British Library were charging for access to papers that should have been OA; he also found some supposedly free papers at hybrid journals from ACS, Blackwell, RSC, and Springer in which the free abstracts linked only to TA editions of the full text or in which free full-text papers used all-rights-reserved copyright statements instead of promised open licenses. All the publishers acknowledged the problems and promised to fix them." (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110)