Open-access journal

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Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available to the reader "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."[1] Some journals are subsidized while others require payment from the author.

There have also been several modifications of open access journals that have considerably different natures:

and

Open access journals are sometimes referred to as "gold" journals in reference to the SHERPA RoMEO color scheme categorizing a publisher's archiving policies.[2] While the original color scheme did not include "gold," it was added as a way to distinguish between open access publishers and other publishers that permit authors to self-archive pre-print and post-print versions of their papers.

Definitions and types

In the original definition from the Budapest Open Access Initiative, "open access" was defined as "that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment." However, there have been a number of modifications of this, both to increase the scope of the requirement, and to make it more flexible. In particular, some journals have made every article, including review articles, open access; this is more than the initial requirement. On the other hand, some otherwise open access journals have a limitation on the commercial reuse of their articles, and this would disqualify them according to the commonly accepted definitions.

In successively looser senses of the term, open access journals may be:

  • Journals that are entirely open access
  • Journals with research articles available in an open access manner
  • Journals with some research articles available in an open access manner
  • Journals with some articles available immediately as open access and other articles available after a delay (or 'embargo')
  • Journals with articles available after a delay (or 'embargo')
  • Journals which permitting self-archiving of articles.

In the categories and discussion below,


Financing open access journals

Subsidized journals are usually financed by an academic institution or a government information center. Those requiring payment from the author are typically financed by money from grants given to researchers from a public or private funding agency. The conditions of the grant may also stipulate that the research be published in an open access journal.


Advantages and disadvantages of open access in general

Advantages

The primary advantage of open access is that the content is available to users everywhere regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library. This will benefit:

  • authors of such articles, who will see their papers more read, more cited, and better integrated into the structure of science
  • academic readers in general at institutions that cannot afford the journal, or where the journal is out of scope
  • researchers at smaller institutions, where their library cannot afford the journal
  • readers in general, who may be interested in the subject matter
  • the general public, who will have the opportunity to see what scientific reseach is about
  • taxpayers who will see the results of the research they pay for
  • patients and those caring for them, who will be able to keep abreast of medical research
For more information, see: Open access.


Disadvantages

There are two categories of objections

  1. Open access in unnecessary
  2. Open access is too impractical to implement.
For more information, see: Open access.


Advantages and disadvantages of open access journals as a mode of open access

The primary advantage of open access journals is that the entire content is available to users everywhere regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library. In contrast, with self-archiving, only some of the journal articles are available, and it is not possible for the reader to know which they might be.

Advantages for the author

  • The main motivation for most authors to publish in a open access journal is increased visibility and ultimately a citation advantage (see also Open access). Research citations of articles in a Hybrid open access journal has shown that open access articles are cited more frequently or earlier than non-Open Access articles [1].


Disadvantages

  • In case of fee-based open-access journals, authors either need to have a sponsor (such as a funder or employer) to pay on their behalf, oe personally pay the publication fee.

Current problems and projects

Identifying open access journals and the articles in them

There are several major directories of open access journals, most notably: Directory of Open Access Journals(DOAJ) and Open J-Gate Each has its own special standards for what journals are included.

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.

The major open access publishers include bibliographic data for the many journals they publish.

Major projects to provide open access journals

Pioneers in open access publishing in the biomedical domain were a few individual journals like the British Medical Journal (BMJ) (now no longer open access), the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Medscape, which made their content freely accessible in the late 1990s [2]. BioMedCentral, a for-profit publisher with now several hundred open access journals, published its first article in 2000 [3]. The Public Library of Science launched its first open-access journal, PLoS Biology in 2003, PLoS Medicine in 2004, and several others since then, the most recent being PLoS One in 2006 [4].

Criticism

Opponents of the open access model assert that the pay-for-access model is necessary to ensure that the publisher is adequately compensated for their work. Scholarly journal publishers that support pay-for-access claim that the "gatekeeper" role they play, maintaining a scholarly reputation, arranging for peer review, and editing and indexing articles, require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model. The cost of paper publication may also make open access to paper copies infeasible. Opponents claim that open access is not necessary to ensure fair access to developing nations; differential pricing, or financial aid from developed countries or instititions can make access to proprietary journals affordable.

Reactions of existing publishers to open access journal publishing have ranged from moving with enthusiasm to a new open access business model, to experiments with providing as much free or open access as possible, to active lobbying against open access proposals. There are many new publishers starting up as open access publishers, with the Public Library of Science being the best-known example.

Open access is the subject of much discussion amongst academics, librarians, university administrators, government official, commercial publishers, and learned society publishers. There is substantial disagreement about the concept of open access, along with much debate and discussion about the economics of funding an open access scholarly communications system.

History

Many journals have been subsidized ever since the beginnings of scientific journals. It is common for those countries with developing higher educational and research facilities to subsidze the publication of the nation's scientific and academic researchers, and even to provide for others to publish in such journals, to build up the prestige of these journals and their visibility. Such subsidies have sometimes been partial, to reduce the subscription price, or total, for those readers in the respective countries, but are now often universal.

In 1998, one of the first open access journals in medicine, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR)[5] was created, publishing its first issue in 1999. What is remarkable about this development is that it was created by researchers for researchers, without involvement of any commercial publishers, and with practically no budget. JMIR remains a highly successful open access journal and to date is perhaps one of the few (the only?) OA journals which is not making a loss or is dependent on external grants (such as PLoS).

Open access by the numbers



references

  1. ↑ Budapest Open Access Initiative. Available: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml Accessed: 2007-01-31
  2. ↑ SHERPA RoMEO Colours, Pre-print, Post-print, Definitions and Terms. Available: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html Accessed: 2007-01-31.
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