Viability of Open Access Journals
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Dr. B. Maharana Sambalpur University [email protected] “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs.” Types of scholarly communication (Formal & Informal) Changes in Scholarly Communication Changes to the publishing market (e.g. new business models like open access; new sales models such as consortia licensing; globalisation and the growth of emerging regions) Changes to the way research is conducted (e.g. use of networks; growth of data intensive and data- driven science; globalisation of research) Changes to public policy (e.g. research funder self-archiving mandates; changes to copyright) What is a Journal The journal has traditionally been seen to embody four functions: . Registration: third-party establishment by date-stamping of the author’s precedence and ownership of an idea . Dissemination: communicating the findings to its intended audience usually via the brand identity of the journal . Certification: ensuring quality control through peer review and rewarding authors . Archival record: preserving a fixed version of the paper for future reference and citation. History of Scholarly Journals • The publishing of scholarly journals, begun in the 17th century, expanded greatly in the 19th as fresh fields of inquiry opened up or old ones were further divided into specialties. • The history of scientific journals dates from 1665, when the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first began systematically publishing research results Open Access Journals Open-access 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.” Peter Suber History of Open Access Efforts before Internet Physicist Leó Szilárd jokingly suggested in the 1940s…….at the beginning of his career each scientist should be issued with 100 vouchers to pay for his papers……. Hind Swaraj (Mahatma Gandhi) intellectual blueprint of India's freedom movement (in Gujarati in 1909) with a copyright legend that read……. "No Rights Reserved". OA History…….. Early years of online OA Earliest book publisher to provide open access was the National Academies Press (the publisher of National Academy of Science, USA) since 1994…….to promote sales of print editions… SPARC developed in 1997, to address the journal crisis and develop and promote alternatives, such as open access. The first online-only, free-access journals (eventually to be called "open access journals") began appearing in the late 1980s……….. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Postmodern Culture and Psycologuy OA History…….. The first free scientific online archive was arXiv.org, started in 1991, initially a preprint service for physicists, initiated by Paul Ginsparg In 1997, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) made Medline In 1999, Harold Varmus of the NIH proposed a journal called E-biomed….later as PubMed Central In 1999 that the Open Archives Initiative and its OAI- PMH was launched in order to make online archives interoperable. History of OA….2000s • In 2000, BioMed Central, a for-profit open access publisher, was launched by the then Current Science Group (by 2013, BioMed Central publishes over 250 journals.) • In 2001, 34,000 scholars around the world signed "An Open Letter to Scientific Publishers", calling for…..establishment of an online public library (Medicine and Life Sciences)……….lead to PLoS • The first major international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, launched by the Open Society Institute….first definition of OA • Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003. History of OA……2010s • In 2013, John Holdren, Barack Obama's Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, issued a memorandum…. with more than $100M in annual R&D expenditures…….to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year • In 2013, the UK Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) proposed adopting a mandate that ….all peer-reviewed journal articles submitted after 2014 must be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication Two Vehicles of Open Access • Gold OA…Open Access Journals • Green OA…Open Access Repositories Open Access Journals (Subject wise distribution) Growth of Open access Journals Academic Spring…few Indian supporters Prof. Sumeet Agarwal Indian Institute of Technology Delhi - Engineering and Technology •won't publish •won't referee •won't do editorial work Prof. Maninder Agrawal IIT Kanpur - Computer Science •won't publish •won't referee won't do editorial work I was an editor of Information and Computation and on the Elsevier India Advisory Board. I have quit from both in protest against their practices…… Prof. B. Sury Indian Statistical Institute - Mathematics won't publish won't referee won't do editorial work This kind of commercialism hits hard in a country like mine. Sir Mark Walport, Director of Wellcome Trust (The largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), ………his organisation is in the final stages of launching a high calibre scientific journal called eLife that would compete directly with top-tier publications such as Nature and Science • "One of the biggest costs in the whole scientific publishing world is borne by the academic community, which is the peer review," said Walport. "The journals have benefitted from having free, potentially very expensive consultancy. Again, why do we do that, if the end product is going to be locked behind a paywall?“ • Walport said there was a trend for conservatism in the scientific community because scientists want to get published in the most prestigious journal brands such as Nature, Science or Cell. Open access at Elsevier – 2013 in retrospect and a look at 2014 • Key themes during 2013 were multi-stakeholder collaboration and scaling up gold open access publishing • we see strong collaboration among authors, institutions, funders, libraries, and publishers • In the UK, we have been helping to support the implementation of the national open access policy, and the new open access policies of the Research Councils UK and Wellcome Trust. Elsevier's contributions have spanned gold open access, green open access,and licensed access. In partnership with JISC Collections, Elsevier has undertaken a number of initiatives focused on affordability for institutions d publishers • We launched a gold open access prepayment pilot plan to help participating universities budget during the transition to open access • Elsevier also facilitated the retrospective conversion to open access of 672 articles published in 2012 by authors in UK universities. United States • The CHORUS initiative (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) enables publishers to work with US government funding agencies to provide public access in a very cost-effective manner and in ways that do not increase administrative and compliance burdens for researchers and universities. • SHARE (Shared Access Research Ecosystem), a similar initiative to leverage networked repositories to expand public access and that will be an important conversation to continue in 2014 International Collaboration • Elsevier was an active participant in the SCOAP3 open access initiative for the high- energy physics community, led by CERN. We adjusted library contracts worldwide to reimburse the subscription prices for the two participating Elsevier journals; Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics Letter B. In turn, libraries redirected these funds to SCOAP3, which centrally supports the open access costs of the flipped journals. This means article publishing charges are paid centrally and not by individual authors. Read more in our article "CERN-driven open access initiative to take off, and Elsevier's on board.“ • In addition, Elsevier's popular Publishing Connect workshops, run in collaboration with universities around the world, help educate early-career researchers about open access publishing and the new choices they need to consider. We have also been engaged closely with funders and policy makers around the globe about successful, scalable open access policies. In April, for example, we collaborated with the African Academy of Sciences to discuss "Open access in Africa – changes and challenges," and during the year, we visited funders and other stakeholders on every continent except Antarctica.[divider] Gold Open Access • We launched 35 new open access journals in 2013, and also now host over 90 third-party owned open access journals on ScienceDirect. In these, and in our more than 1,600 established journals that offer open access publishing options, we have adapted a wide array of fresh new open access publishing policies since April Director of Access and Policy for Elsevier, Dr. Alicia Wise (@wisealic) Rachel Martin (@rachelcmartin) is the Access and Policy Communications Manager • We have made improvements to our ScienceDirect platform to enable users to search, filter and find open access content. • Elsevier hascontinued to establishagreements with funding