The Springer publishing company today announced that it is setting up a new open-access journal program. Called SpringerOpen, the program will initially include 12 new online-only, peer-reviewed journals in science, technical, and medical fields.
The Chronicle sat down with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer’s executive vice president for corporate communications, and Bettina Goerner, the company’s manager of open access, to talk about the program. (They were in town for the annual meeting of the American Library Association.) They emphasized that all SpringerOpen journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows reuse of articles as long as the authors are given credit. So if you’re an instructor who wants to use a SpringerOpen article in a course you’re teaching, “you can include it in course packages without e-mailing Springer’s rights department,” Mr. Merkel-Sobotta said.
The first two journals, Security and Intelligence Informatics and the Journal of Mathematics in Industry, will begin accepting submissions in a couple of weeks, Ms. Goerner said. The first SpringerOpen articles are likely to appear early in 2011. The journals’ subject areas were picked to complement rather than compete with Springer’s existing journals portfolio. BioMed Central, which Springer acquired in 2008, will provide technical support and expertise.
Like most STM journals, SpringerOpen publications will charge author-side fees. There will be a waiver system in place, however, for authors who cannot afford the fees; the waivers will be administered by an independent board, according to Mr. Merkel-Sobotta and Ms. Goerner. BioMed’s Open Access Membership program, which is available to institutions, scholarly societies, organizations that provide funds, and other groups, will include the SpringerOpen journals as well. Springer has also been testing the open-access waters with its Open Choice program, which allows authors to make their articles openly available (in exchange for an open-access fee).
Mr. Merkel-Sobotta told The Chronicle that SpringerOpen represents “the next logical step” for the publisher as it seeks to make open access part of its business model. “Open-access debates have been very similar to debates held in the Middle Ages,” he said, with crusaders and zealots attacking each other. “If you don’t get involved in the extremes, you can actually do something constructive for the scientific community.”
Encouraged by its open-access experiments so far, Springer has also been hearing from groups that provide funds as well as some authors that they have made open-access options a priority, Mr. Merkel-Sobotta said. “Springer has accepted that open access is a sustainable business model” for the company, even if it occupies just one niche in a larger portfolio of publishing operations. “Internally that’s a big step,” he said.
6 Responses to Springer Announces New Open-Access Journals
petersuber - June 28, 2010 at 10:42 pm
“Like most STM journals, SpringerOpen publications will charge author-side fees.” Unfortunately this perpetuates a common misunderstanding. Most OA journals charge *no* author-side fees. In fact only about 30% of the OA journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals charge author-side fees. For the latest survey evidence, see .
petersuber - June 28, 2010 at 10:45 pm
The Chronicle software clipped the URL from the end of my previous comment. Here’s one more attempt to include it: http://goo.gl/p5n7
danielrhood - June 29, 2010 at 7:24 am
As always, thank you Peter for your research and contribuition to the study of OA publishing.
jenhoward - June 29, 2010 at 9:05 am
Thanks for your comment and that link, Peter. The point I was trying to make in the story is that most STM journals–certainly the non-OA ones–DO charge author-side fees and that that’s the model SpringerOpen is adopting.
11159995 - June 29, 2010 at 9:59 am
Yes, Peter, but that authors don’t pay doesn’t mean it costs nothing to run those OA journals, so the money is coming from somewhere. The key point is whether that money is as much of a cost to the system overall as the cost of traditional subscriptions is. What savings, when everything is taken into consideration, are being achieved by going OA, if any? There have been many claims that OA is cheaper, but little proof because so many “hidden” costs are not taken into account. Even if the costs are the same, though, one may argue–as Peter does–that the benefits in greater access to knowledge make OA a superior approach.—Sandy Thatcher
mbelvadi - June 29, 2010 at 10:20 am
Sandy, the one huge “cost” that only for-profit publishers charge for is their own profit margin. My understanding is that most OA journals are also non-profit, although I’m not surprised that the for-profit journal publishing industry is trying to figure out how to preserve its secretive-but-generally-known-to-be-excessively-high profits in the face of the OA movement through the use of author side fees.Has anyone done a study yet comparing OA author side fees (among the 30% of journals that charge them) charged by non-profit publications to those charged by the for-profits?