From the issue dated January 30, 2004
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2 Routes to Open Access: Archives and Institutional Subscriptions
Universities that want to support open-access publishing of scientific research have found two ways to do so: create their own archives and buy institutional subscriptions to author-pays journals. The institutions can sign up with BioMed Central, a commercial publisher of more than 100 author-pays journals. If an institution pays a flat fee, every one of its researchers can publish papers in BioMed Central journals free instead of paying $500 per paper. BioMed Central has around 400 institutional members, many of which pay through their library budgets. The publisher's annual fees start at $1,600 for very small institutions. The University of California pays $20,000 to $25,000 a year for its membership. In mid-January, the Public Library of Science, the most high-profile open-access publisher, announced that it, too, would offer institutional memberships. Potential members can choose from a range of options. If they pay $2,000 annually, their researchers would receive 10 percent off the $1,500 publication fee. Or they can pay as much as $100,000 annually, which would give researchers 75 percent off. Though libraries could let researchers pay the author fees, some say they have joined BioMed Central in order to support a movement they believe in. "Even in tight times, it's worth providing this opportunity," says Tom Sanville, executive director of OhioLINK, a consortium of academic libraries in Ohio. Online Repositories Another way that universities and their libraries are trying to make scientific literature freely available is by creating online archives, where scientists can post their preprints or published papers. Physicists have been putting preprints online since 1991 at ArXiv.org, an Internet repository begun by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now hosted by Cornell University. In the past couple of years, cross-disciplinary archives have been set up by other universities, including the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and, most prominently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has developed software used by at least 15 other institutions. Widespread use of institutional archives would be the fastest way to make the scientific literature available free, say some open-access proponents. They note that the 700 or so open-access journals make up a tiny fraction of the more than 20,000 scientific and medical publications. Many publishers, including Reed Elsevier, already allow researchers to post preprints or papers in online repositories. Stevan Harnad, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Quebec at Montreal, calls it "scandalous" that most of the research literature is not already available in archives. Creating an archive is easy; getting faculty members to fill it is more difficult. Many researchers are unaware of the repositories, or fear that publishers won't allow their use, or think (wrongly) that placing a paper in an archive is a substitute for publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Scholars "have silly, short worries that are easily replied to," says Mr. Harnad, who is one of the most outspoken advocates of the repositories. Still, he acknowledges that researchers are unlikely to make use of the archives unless universities require it. http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 21, Page A11 | |||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education