The Crisis in Scholarly Communication - Alternative Publishing Models
Alternative Publishing Models
New publishing models are gaining acceptance as alternatives to traditional publishing practices. This doesn’t mean that any one of them will necessarily solve the scholarly communication problem, but they represent experiments to see what can be changed.
This is a very incomplete list of the new initiatives taking place. See a more complete list of new modes of publishing that allow more access to scholarship without high price barriers. See also this Open Access News blog for the latest happenings in the field.
Open Access
An Open Access Publication as defined by the Bethesda Statement is one that meets the following two conditions:
- The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
There are several publishers of Open Access journals:
- Public Library of Science
- BioMed Central
- For a full list of Open Access journals, see the Directory of Open Access Journals
Some traditional journals have adapted a hybrid model, allowing authors to pay a fee to make their article open access (even though the journal as a whole is not open access).
Free Access to journal articles
- Many scholarly society journals and other nonprofit publisher journals allow their articles to be made available free on the Internet 6 months after publication.
- PubMed Central is a free archive of the biomedical literature containing articles that were contributed by publishers or by authors. The National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy encourages investigators to submit electronic versions of final accepted manuscripts from research that is publicly funded to PubMed Central. If unable to submit immediately due to publisher restrictions, a time frame within 12 months is suggested. Currently a bill to make this mandatory is being considered in Congress, and there is a petition to sign.
- ArXiv is an archive for preprints in the fields of physics, mathematics, and computer science that is maintained by Cornell University.
- Many universities are exploring the idea of having an institutional repository of their own faculty manuscripts.
Projects in Affordable Publishing
The following are a few examples of projects:
- SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition partners with publishers to develop alternatives and competition to high-priced journals and encourages change in the system of communication.
- Project MUSE is a partnership of not-for-profit publishers offering essential journals in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences in a library-friendly and reasonably priced way.
- Project Euclid is a collaboration of independent and society publishers in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics to offer quality journals online with low subscription prices.
Modified: 10/05/07