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Where You Publish Makes a Difference
Your choice of where to publish may make a difference in how
often your article is read or cited. Recent research indicates
that readers do not want to expend any time on getting around
barriers to access. By understanding the options available
through open access publishing, you can make it easier for
your colleagues to read and make use of your work.
Will I Be Cited ?
A recent study done by Kristin
Antelman at North Carolina State University indicates
that freely available articles do have a greater research
impact. Though Antelman only looked at four specific
disciplines, it was clear that the more often something
is downloaded, the more likely it is to be cited. In
an article entitled Online
or Invisible, Steve Lawrence of the NEC Research
Institute also opines that free online availability
can substantially increase a paper's impact. Scholars
in various disciplines are being rewarded for choosing
open access publishing.
Because OA journals are a relatively new phenomenon, there
are few impact studies thus far. But despite the paucity
of data, certain subject areas rank OA journals among the
top 9%. Medical titles cited as doing very well are Arthritis
Research and Therapy, Breast Cancer Research, Critical Care, and Respiratory
Research .
Background Information
There are many articles intended to familiarize you with open
access publishing. For a good introduction, see Framing
the Issue by the Association of Research Libraries. The
Wellcome Trust has done a thorough study in Costs
and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing.
To find out more about NIH's recent plan to give access to
taxpayer-funded research, see
this article from the Washington Post and some FAQs.
Jospeph Esposito believes open access will come about through "some
upstart media built with the innate characteristics of the
Internet." See his article, The
Devil You Don't Know.
Models
- Commercial Publishers (library pays)
In this model, the libraries/universities pay
for subscriptions, print or electronic, and the users
typically have free access. Some commercial publishers
are tweaking their policies in order to be competitive
in the open access era, allowing author archiving or
depositing in repositories after a specified period
of time.
- Open Access (author or library pays)
Open access holds the promise of making scholarly
articles freely available to everyone - scholars and
consumers alike - over the internet. Digital access
is free to users with the cost being borne by authors
or their sponsors, often the university library. Peer
review is unchanged. Some of these models are PubMed
Central, PloS, and BioMed
Central. Johns Hopkins is an institutional
member of BioMed Central; therefore the author's
fee is waived for Hopkins researchers who submit articles
to the journals published there.
This mode of open access is often referred to as "The Gold Road" to open access.
For a facinating case study of launching a new open access journal in the humanities, see:
Willinsky, J. & Mendis, R. (2007). "Open access on a zero budget: a case study of Postcolonial Text" Information Research, 12(3) paper 308. Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-3/paper308.html
- Hybrid Models (free and for fee mixture)
Bowing to some of the pressures of open access
publishing, certain publishers have made some of their
journal content free and open while shielding other
articles behind the subscription fees. While having
access to some information is better than nothing, this
model is a complex one to manage. It is a challenge
to librarians and to the public to know what is free
and what is not. An article on the subject is: Open
Access, yes! Open Excess, no!.
- Digital Repositories (local archiving)
Various publishers now allow some form of archiving
locally. This means that authors can deposit their work
voluntarily in repositories at their own institutions
or funding agencies. This movement is just beginning
to gather momentum; few full-fledged local repositories
exist at the moment. For background on the subject,
see Institutional Repositories: Essential
Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age.
Read about models such as arXiv and Dspace.
The NIH recently established a policy for
articles deriving from federally-funded projects. Beginning
May 2, 2005 , authors are asked to deposit their final
manuscripts to the PubMed Central archive within 12
months after the journal publication date. The archive
will be freely available to all.
This mode of open access is often referred to as "The Green Road" to open access.
Other organizations and initiatives aimed at creating publishing
alternatives or open access solutions are:
JScholarship (The Johns Hopkins Institutional Repository)
The Johns Hopkins Institutional Respository provides Hopkins researchers with a convenient and easy-to-use facility to self-archive pre-prints, post-prints, and other documents and media. It therefore supports and facilitates the so-called "Green Road" to open access.
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition)
SPARC is a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries,
and organizations launched in 1998 to enhance broad and cost-effective
access to peer-reviewed scholarship and promote competition
in the scholarly communications market. The SPARC Europe
office, opened in 2002, has 39 members from ten countries
and is based in Oxford, U.K. SPARC initiatives include:
- SPARC Alternatives program: supports incubation
of competitive alternatives to high-priced commercial
journals. Organic Letters ,
an alternative to Tetrahedron Letters, is published
by the American Chemical Society and endorsed by SPARC.
In less than four years, Organic Letters has
published over 14,000 pages of original research in
organic chemistry, and in 2001 it beat its competitor
in impact factors according to the 2001 ISI Journal
Citation Reports.
- SPARC Leading Edge program: supports ventures
that obtain competitive advantage through technology
or innovative business models.
- SPARC Scientific Communities: program supports
development of non-profit portals that serve the needs
of a discrete scientific community by aggregating peer-reviewed
research and other content.
BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed
to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed
biomedical research. Johns Hopkins is an institutional member of BioMed Central;
therefore the author's fee is waived for Hopkins researchers
who submit articles to the journals published by BioMed Central. BioMed
Central features:
- Online submission and peer-review technology available
without charge for groups of scientists who wish to
run open access, online journals under their own editorial
control;
- Retention of copyright for authors who publish original
research articles in journals published by BioMed Central;
- Support of PubMed Central and other digital repositories
that encourage self-archiving by authors.
PubMed
Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is a digital archive of life sciences
journal literature, developed and managed by the National
Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National
Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed Central aims to fill the
role of a world-class library in the digital age. It is
not a journal publisher. PubMed Central features:
- Free and unrestricted access;
- Voluntary participation by publishers, although participating
journals must meet certain editorial standards. All
peer reviewed primary research articles in are included
by journals participating in PMC;
- Flexible public release dates of materials deposited
by journals;
- Retention of copyright by the journal publisher or the
individual author, whichever is applicable.
arXiv
arXiv is a pre-print archive, originally created for the rapid
dissemination of research results in the field of high-energy
physics. Developed by physicist Paul Ginsparg in 1991, arXiv
has become a major forum for the dissemination of research
results in physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational
linguistics and neuroscience. It features:
- An interactive mechanism for scientific communications
that complements and often supplants more traditional
paper publications;
- Free access via the Internet;
- Minimal editorial oversight; comments from other investigators,
both supporting and opposing.
SCOAP3
SCOAP3 is an effort by high energy physicists to make six of their core journals open access.
DSpace
DSpace is a digital repository created to capture, distribute
and preserve the intellectual output of MIT. A joint project
of MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, DSpace
provides stable long-term storage needed to house the digital
products of MIT faculty and researchers.
- For the user: DSpace provides access to DSpace
content through the Web;
- For the contributor: DSpace offers the advantages
of digital distribution and long-term preservation for
a variety of formats including text, audio, video, images,
datasets and more. Authors can store their digital works
in collections that are maintained by MIT communities;
- For the institution: DSpace offers the opportunity
to provide access to all the research of the institution
through one interface.
BioOne
BioOne is an innovative collaboration between scientific societies,
libraries, universities and the private sector. BioOne provides
access to full-text high-impact bioscience research journals,
the majority of which are published by small societies and
non-commercial publishers. Prior to BioOne, these materials
have been available only in printed form. BioOne delivers:
- Thoroughly linked and easily-accessible core research
in the biosciences;
- A cost-effective alternative to high-priced commercially-published
journals;
- A mechanism that enables high-value non-profit journals
from scientific societies to remain independent and
viable.
Budapest Open Archives Initiative (BOAI)
The goal of the BOAI is to accelerate progress in the international
effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely
available on the Internet. With initial funding of $1million
US from the OSI Information Program, the BOAI supports:
- the development of business models and plans for sustainable
self-archiving and open access publishing;
- use of library networks (like the Electronic Information
for Libraries consortium, currently covering 40 countries
- see www.eifl.net)
to mobilize support for open access globally;
- support for researchers in low and middle income countries
to publish in open-access journals which charge up front
fees;
- development of software tools and templates for open
access publishing, self-archiving, indexing and navigation;
- promotion of the open access philosophy among foundations
and donors, science and research funding agencies, libraries
and universities, as well as governments, policymakers
and international organizations worldwide.
Public
Library of Science (PLoS)
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization
of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's
scientific and medical literature a public resource. Goals
are to:
- Open the doors to the world's library of scientific
knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, patient,
or student - anywhere in the world - unlimited access
to the latest scientific research.
- Facilitate research, informed medical practice, and
education by making it possible to freely search the
full text of every published article to locate specific
ideas, methods, experimental results, and observations.
- Enable scientists, librarians, publishers, and entrepreneurs
to develop innovative ways to explore and use the world's
treasury of scientific ideas and discoveries.
PLoS is working with scientists, their societies, funding agencies,
and other publishers to pursue our broader goal of ensuring
an open-access home for every published article and to develop
tools to make the literature useful to scientists and the
public.
PLoS Biology launched its first issue on October 13,
2003, in print and online. PLoS Medicine will follow
in 2004.
SHERPA
SHERPA investigates issues related to the future of scholarly
communication and publishing. In particular, it is initiating
the development of openly accessible institutional digital
repositories of research output in a number of research universities.
These so-called 'e-print archives' will contain papers by
researchers from the participating institutions.
The site also hosts the Publishers Copyrights Listings (ROMEO)
service, which lists publisher's copyright transfer agreements.
SHERPA: Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation
and Access.
SHERPA is funded by JISC and CURL. It is hosted by the University
of Nottingham.
Open Humanities Press
Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory.
Open Humanities Press journals are fully peer reviewed, scholarly publications that have been chosen by OHP's editorial advisory board for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theory. OHP's journals are independent, published under open access licences and free of charge to readers and authors alike.
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