PLOS has a great discussion about the issues at stake, and they refer to the OAS brochure, which is provided in many languages.
The second page of this OAS brochure is very short, clear and helpful. Recommended!
Showing posts with label open access. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open access. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
How "open" is "Open Access"
As the Open Access model becomes increasingly important for public knowledge dissemination, some agencies with vested interests have begun to complicate matters by introducing hybrid publishing models. Some of these are not fully in the interests of authors or readers.
PLOS has a great discussion about the issues at stake, and they refer to the OAS brochure, which is provided in many languages.
The second page of this OAS brochure is very short, clear and helpful. Recommended!
PLOS has a great discussion about the issues at stake, and they refer to the OAS brochure, which is provided in many languages.
The second page of this OAS brochure is very short, clear and helpful. Recommended!
Monday, July 08, 2013
Resources for OA book publication
My post "Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research," was self-evidently devoted to journals.
There is also a growing field of services for publishing OA books. Some research funding agencies, such as the FWF in Austria, require contractually that books too should be published OA. To me, the business model for OA book publishing is less clear than that for journals, and I see many difficulties. Nevertheless, the field is growing.
Some resources:
There is also a growing field of services for publishing OA books. Some research funding agencies, such as the FWF in Austria, require contractually that books too should be published OA. To me, the business model for OA book publishing is less clear than that for journals, and I see many difficulties. Nevertheless, the field is growing.
Some resources:
- Directory of Open Access Books
"The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact." - Knowledge Unlatched
"Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit organisation committed to helping global communities share the costs of Open Access publishing so that good books continue to be published and more readers are able to engage with them." - Open Humanities Press
"The basic idea is simple: making peer-reviewed literature permanently available, free of charge and freely redistributable by taking advantage of the low cost and wide access of internet distribution." ... "After looking at the various efforts underway, we concluded that an editorially-driven international press, focused on building respect through its brand, is what is required to tackle the digital 'credibility' problem. With OHP, we aim to emulate the strengths and flexibility of commercial presses, while avoiding the institutional limitations of the university-based e-presses." - Open Edition
"OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses and Calenda, four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences." - Open Edition Books
"OpenEdition Books est une plateforme de livres en sciences humaines et sociales. Plus de la moitié d'entre eux est en libre accès. Des services complémentaires sont proposés via les bibliothèques et institutions abonnées." - Open Access Publishing European Network
"Online library and publication platform. The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation."
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research
And see the India-related list that used to be maintained by Scholars Without Borders (mostly science and medicine):
Saying that a journal is OA still leaves some critical questions unanswered. E.g.,
- Is there a "going in" fee, or Article Processing Fee (APF)?
One of the items in the list above charges $300. Several of the big houses like Brill, Elsevier and Springer will also publish your article as OA, even in an otherwise non-OA journal, if you pay them enough. Their APF prices are typically $3000 (Springer, Elsevier). I am not interested in including such journals in the list above, as I consider anything above $300-500 to be profiteering. APFs of $300-500 are typical of some even very large OA publishers like Hindawi, proving that this is a valid business model.
Quite apart from my personal view, I do not think APF fees of $3000 meet most people's normal expectation of the meaning of an Open Access journal. As South Asianists, we are interested in access for both readers and authors in countries where scholars are relatively poor. A high APF mutes less wealthy authors. As such, both Gratis OA (also called "Diamond OA") and low or zero APFs are indexes of relevance. - Copyright: being OA means that whoever owns the copyright has given permission for the article to be disseminated at zero cost. But it doesn't say anything about who owns the copyright of the article. Many OA journals allow the authors to retain copyright, but not all.
- Is the journal online-only, or both online and in print?
- The online version is free by definition, but the print issues would usually cost something. How much?
- Is the journal indexed by the main global indexing services?
- Is the journal peer-reviewed? Strongly or weakly?
More distinctions (e.g., Gratis OA (free of price) and Libre OA (free of price and rights restrictions)) and discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 13 Feb 2012). The Sherpa/Romeo website helps with some of this.
I'm putting some indicators in parentheses after the journal title, for those cases where I can find out the information without correspondence.
It is often hard to find out these facts from the journals' websites. This suggests to me that for some of the editors, the various business models of OA publishing are not always well understood.
[2022-11: I keep the above list up to date as I hear of new journals. But some of the work of this blog post has now been superseded by FOASAS.]
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*APF = Article Processing Fee, a fee that the publisher charges the author or the author's institution for publication in the Open Access journal. See discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 12 Feb 2012).
Monday, January 21, 2013
Business models for Open Access journals
It seems to be becoming clear that OA publishing will come to be the dominant model for academic periodical publications. This change is happening rapidly in Science, Technology and Medicine publishing. It can be expected that Humanities journals will eventually follow in even greater numbers than at present.
As things change, some interesting new business models are emerging. See http://peerJ.com, for example. It turns on its head the idea of subscribing to a learned society and getting the society's journal. Quite fascinating.
See also the new OA projects by CUP, (£500 publishing fee) and especially Tim Gowers' blog., that describes several key points clearly.
Some of my own thoughts
In August 2008 I did some brain-storming on this subject with my friends C. V. Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan. Here are some of my notes from those exchanges.
I was thinking about this problem that if the funding model changes from "reader pays" to "author pays", then not everyone could afford to publish. Independent scholars, or those at 3rd world universities, might be priced out of publication.
As things change, some interesting new business models are emerging. See http://peerJ.com, for example. It turns on its head the idea of subscribing to a learned society and getting the society's journal. Quite fascinating.
See also the new OA projects by CUP, (£500 publishing fee) and especially Tim Gowers' blog., that describes several key points clearly.
Some of my own thoughts
In August 2008 I did some brain-storming on this subject with my friends C. V. Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan. Here are some of my notes from those exchanges.
I was thinking about this problem that if the funding model changes from "reader pays" to "author pays", then not everyone could afford to publish. Independent scholars, or those at 3rd world universities, might be priced out of publication.
- An OA journal *must* consider itself free to publish good peer-reviewed research, whether or not there's funding. So there has to be a "let-out" or discretionary waiver clause in any statement about pricing.
- Would it be feasible for the journal to have a sliding scale of
charges that is directly keyed to the budget of the institution to which
the author belongs? University budgets should be publicly available
somewhere, shouldn't they? It might take a bit of work to track them
down, but it could be done. Or the authors could simply be asked to
provide that information. In any case, if a university has a big
endowment or annual budget, then their staff would be charged more to
publish in the journal, and v.v. Independent scholars would be free (?)
or <$100.
The general idea is that a scholar from Cambridge Univ. or the TIFR, Bombay, could be charged $500 to publish an article in our hypothetical OA journal, on the assumption that his department has a budget for this (an "article processing fee"). Whereas Prof. Shivaramakrishna from a Jnanamatha in Trichy, or a Dr Salvador from Havana Univ., could be permitted to publish at $30.
Or if direct keying is not easy to implement, there could at least be general funding bands: we could find somebody else's ranking, perhaps UNESCO, for national education budgets, or educational funding, and use those as bands for submission charges. - Here's an important tweak. I think this kind of banded charging can be
thought of a bit like Google's AdSense advertising system. Basically,
the university is paying to have its name associated with the research
that is published. So at the top of the article it says,
Dominik Wujastyk
University College London
[university address]
and the University pays the journal $100 (or whatever) for document processing.
However, if I - as an author - choose, I can say instead,
Dominik Wujastyk
Independent Scholar
[home address]
and then there would be no charge for document processing.
It wouldn't matter to the journal whether it was actually true or not that DW was an "independent scholar". The point is, if there's no payment, then the university or research sponsor doesn't get its name mentioned, and is therefore not formally associated with the research. This treats the association of the university's name with the research rather like advertising or product placement.
Most research contracts require the academic to include acknowledgement in his publications of the source of the funding. "This research was carried out under grant 123456789 of the National Science Foundation". So if the NSF is making such a requirement, they have to pay for it to be done. It's quite like advertising.
Saturday, August 04, 2012
Publishing in Medical History: The author's view
If I am an author coming to Medical History today, with a view to submitting my article for publication, what can I expect?
The journal's website has the statement reproduced in the Appendix below (after "Read more>>"). The website used to have CUP's normal "Transfer of Copyright" and OA conditions too, but these appear to have been removed recently (see image right).
Here are the questions I might ask:
When you write something original, you automatically own the copyright of it. And as such, nobody is allowed to copy your article without your permission.
But what if you want people to copy your work, say from your website, while still respecting your authorship? You want to give away some of your rights, but not all of them.
That's where the CC licenses come in. They say, in effect, "I own the copyright, buster, so watch out. But in advance, I give you certain rights, and here they are. ..."
As long as you still own the copyright, you are free to add one of these CC licenses to your article, stipulating exactly what others may or may not do with your article. Here (right) is one I prepared earlier. In this case, I've chosen the license that says that people using my article have to state that I wrote it (attribution), they can't sell it (non-commercial), and they can tweak or remix or build upon my article, as long as they release the new work under an identical license (share-alike).
What CUP says in the OA Options document below is that if you go for the Gold OA option, and pay CUP $675, your article will be published free, online immediately, with a Creative Commons license. What isn't made explicit is that CUP wants you to transfer your copyright to them, and the CC license will be issued by them, not you.
Let me repeat that for the hard-of-hearing: if you pay CUP, they will relieve you of your copyright.
They will then release your work with a CC license of their choosing.
I am basing the above on the copyright forms that are normally issued by CUP for authors who choose Green OA, for example the form for Modern Asian Studies. There seem to be different "Transfer of Copyright" forms for each journal that CUP publishes. Sometimes the copyrights are transferred to the society or college behind the journal (SOAS, RAS), at other times the rights are transferred to CUP (as with the transfer forms that were on the MH website, but have now been removed). As far as I have seen, copyright is in every case taken away from the author.
Copyright and free, online access
The journal's website has the statement reproduced in the Appendix below (after "Read more>>"). The website used to have CUP's normal "Transfer of Copyright" and OA conditions too, but these appear to have been removed recently (see image right).Here are the questions I might ask:
- Will I retain copyright of my article?
Normally, yes. But I may want to give it away.- Why would I want to give it away?
Because I would like my article to appear on the CUP website AND I would like to pay nothing, AND I would like a "one year subscription embargo period." (I don't know what that means.)
- Why would I want to give it away?
- Will I have to pay anything?
Only if you want to. - Will my article be free for the public to read?
Yes, always. All articles will be published online immediately, with Open Access, on the PMC website. - Will my article be published online, Open Access, online, immediately on the CUP website?
Only if I pay $675. And in this case, I probably have to give up my copyright.- Why would I do that?Because then my article will enjoy the added benefits of being on the CUP website.
Creative Commons licenses
The statement in the Appendix below raises the issue of CC licenses when discussing "Green OA." What is a CC license? It's all explained in baby language at http://creativecommons.org/.
When you write something original, you automatically own the copyright of it. And as such, nobody is allowed to copy your article without your permission.
But what if you want people to copy your work, say from your website, while still respecting your authorship? You want to give away some of your rights, but not all of them.
That's where the CC licenses come in. They say, in effect, "I own the copyright, buster, so watch out. But in advance, I give you certain rights, and here they are. ..."
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| bottom of page one. |
What CUP says in the OA Options document below is that if you go for the Gold OA option, and pay CUP $675, your article will be published free, online immediately, with a Creative Commons license. What isn't made explicit is that CUP wants you to transfer your copyright to them, and the CC license will be issued by them, not you.
Let me repeat that for the hard-of-hearing: if you pay CUP, they will relieve you of your copyright.
They will then release your work with a CC license of their choosing.
I am basing the above on the copyright forms that are normally issued by CUP for authors who choose Green OA, for example the form for Modern Asian Studies. There seem to be different "Transfer of Copyright" forms for each journal that CUP publishes. Sometimes the copyrights are transferred to the society or college behind the journal (SOAS, RAS), at other times the rights are transferred to CUP (as with the transfer forms that were on the MH website, but have now been removed). As far as I have seen, copyright is in every case taken away from the author.
CUP corrects the copyright statement on MH back issues
True to their word, as reported yesterday, CUP has now corrected the copyright statements attached to the back-issues of articles from the journal Medical History. This recognizes the fact that the copyright of these articles belongs to their authors.
I'm still not sure that it's right to say "Published by Cambridge University Press." I believe my article was published by University College London, who were the publishers of the journal at the time my article was published in 2007. Nor is the "published online 17 May 2012" right, since it was published online in 2007 by PMC. I hope that these issues can also be straightened out.
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| Current article also (C) its author. |
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