Open Access Wiki wants to become the place to be to read about and discuss open access in scientific communities

In the news:

• Open Access fund stimulates world-wide propagation of knowledge; (July 1 2008) from 1 April 2008 until the end of 2008, researchers can utilise a Publishing Fund to finance OA publishing costs (Order form)
• Release of software enables European portal for scholarly research; (June 19 2008)
• Open Access publishing at TU Delft; TU Delft promotes Open Access: (June 12 2008)
• Launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals; (April 23 2008)

Propositions for the public discussion

Give your opinion!

Scientific merit

- Open Access will improve the quality of scientific publications.
- Peer review is guaranteed in an Open Access publishing model.
- A journal’s “impact factor” will no longer be relevant; an article will be judged on its own citation rating.

Accessibility

- Open Access will be analogous to Open Source.
- Open Access will make intermediaries or document delivery services obsolete.
- Governments should ensure maximum accessibility of the results of publicly funded research.

Cost structure

- Publishers’ pay-per-view model will demonstrate that there is only a limited market for a small number of widely read articles.
- Authors will be prepared to pay for peer review and the publication of their research results.

What is Open Access Publishing?

• Who is involved? Read more about who's active in the Open Access Community.
  
• What do publishers think and do about it?
• OA Business models
• Best practices and experiences

About book worms and snakes in the grass: Open access deserves open debate

by Maria Heijne

In 2001 I published a column in the SURF journal SURF Cahier (nr.30;November 2001).
I referred to an article in a Dutch Elsevier weekly where librarians (and researchers) were pictured as book worms in their “marginal struggle” for new (business/technical) models for publication of scientific output. Our pleas for alternative models were then and now received with a bantering tone by publishers.
In the column I predicted that the book worm could turn out to be a snake in the grass!

And indeed we DAREd to bite: the DARE project was the basis to start institutional repositories, and in 2007 it turns out to be a success with international standing: the discussion around new publication and business models appears high on all important agenda’s. Funding agencies join the debate and the EU, although impressed by the lobby of the publishers, supports openly the idea that public funded research should be published in open access.
In the mean time, publishers individually started open access ‘experiments’: they preserve the precious subscription model (paid for by the library) and offer in conjunction open access paid for by individual authors. It is not very surprising that this model will never succeed without a perspective on cost saving to the parties involved: libraries and authors.

And the publishers now think the best antidote to the snakebite is to hire a ‘pit bull’: they hired a well known aggressive PR agent (Dezenhall Resources) to take on the free-information movement’ (www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445347a.html).
The article states ‘The publishers' link with Dezenhall reflects how seriously they are taking recent developments on access to information’.

I think we could see this as a victory for the book worms. And we really should welcome this because it could mean that publishers finally realize that the efforts from the bookworms have impact. Only now they may be ready to take serious steps in thinking with us about the real changes that have to be made to opening access to publicly funded information.

Researchers, Libraries and publishers together can now start the open debate that open access deserves.

And please let the very first step be unity in terminology: open archiving, self archiving, open access, open choice, Gold OA, Green OA, pay-to-publish, hybrid models…..
Only a clear understanding of what we are talking about can open up the discussion.

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