by Just de Leeuwe

Introduction
The Open Access movement has passed beyond the pioneering phase. Almost 230 organizations, including the TU Delft, have now endorsed and signed the Berlin Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which lays down the basic principles of Open Access. In this international declaration (initiated by the German Max-Planck-Gesellschaft), many universities in and outside Europe express their intention to publish all their academic articles via open access, a facility that opens up the results of publicly-funded research to anyone interested via online databases, free of charge. Practical solutions to ensure success have been developed at both national and international level. Academic information will now be more accessible than ever before. The financiers of academic researchers are staunch supporters of Open Access. More and more financiers (a recent addition being the European Commission), are making a stand against the traditional subscription models that confine access to academic research results to a limited group. Financiers are demanding that publishers provide unrestricted access to academic findings, with due regard for an embargo period where necessary. The publishers themselves are also doing their best to modify their business models in line with the changing world of Open Access. They are experimenting with models in which the publishing costs are transferred from the organization (often the libraries) to the authors of academic research. The Open Access publishing model is one of the two most important moves within the Open Access movement in terms of achieving the goals: setting up Open Access Repositories is the other.

Repositories
Open Access Repositories, such as the TU Delft Repository, are used for storing and providing access to dissertations, articles and conference proceedings. Repositories do not organize peer reviews, but provide access to academic material. The repositories store academic articles that have not yet undergone peer review (the so-called 'pre-prints'), and articles that have already passed through the peer review ('post-prints') or both. These archives can be organized and maintained at the level of the individual organizations, universities, laboratories, but they can also be arranged so that they cover entire disciplines, such as physics, economics or history. Authors are free to deposit 'pre-prints' themselves without having to ask permission, and the vast majority of publishers already allow authors to deposit the 'post-print' in the repositories too. Archives that endorse the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative are interchangeable, so readers are able find everything in the archives via popular search engines such as Google, without having to know exactly which archive to access or where they are. There is a range of open-source software for setting up repositories that satisfy the OAI-metadata requirements, and the number of people using the facility world-wide would seem to be rising sharply. At national level, the Dutch repositories have experienced considerable growth. Starting in 2003 with the DAREnet, the joint Open Access database of the Dutch universities now provides access to 120,000 online publications, including 14,000 Theses. On a world-wide scale, OAIster, the most comprehensive database of the Open Access Repositories, contains 11,000.000 objects emanating from more than 750 organisations.

Open Access journals
Unlike the repositories, Open Access journals have a direct link with the organization and supervision of peer review. They also have a task in making the articles, after they have withstood this quality assessment, freely accessible without charge. The costs of organizing and supervising peer review, making the manuscripts suitable, and keeping their internet servers in the air are their own responsibility. Open Access journals are de facto and therefore not free of charge, but they do not recoup the costs from their readers.

Directory of Open Access Journals-DOAJ
Almost half of the Open Access journals are fully subsidized by a university or a learned society. Most of these journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is hosted by the University of Lund in Sweden and which currently contains 2,600 titles. The titles in DOAJ are of the same quality as journals that are purchased as paid models after quality controls and peer review. The journals on this platform that receive sufficient funding are able to waive the author’s contribution. Other sources of income such as advertising and other services can sometimes help to distribute the journal free of charge.

Business model
Established publishers with commercial interests deploy a different Open Access model. The principle in which the publisher asks the author for a contribution as part of the research funding (which is reimbursed by the university or the research fund in practically all cases) is becoming increasingly popular. Open Access journals asking for a contribution from the author will usually grant an exemption to authors who can prove that they are unable to pay or recoup the costs elsewhere. A number of institutes and consortia stipulate (quantity) discount on the author’s contribution, and some Open Access publishers offer institutional ‘membership', so that individual authors attached to the institution in question are not faced with a request for a financial contribution if they want to publish in one of the publisher’s journals. These business models are still in their infancy when it comes to finding sources of income for Open Access. Only a very limited number of publishers currently have a working business model. The majority are still at the exploratory stage. Non-profit organisation Public Library of Science is already working with an open access model. The best-known representative from the commercial publishers is without doubt BioMed Central. Many large commercial publishers are hesitant and sceptical about replacing the business models that they still consider to be so profitable. The academic journal market has always deviated from conventional economic market forces. The monopoly of the publishers prevented supply corresponding with demand. As a result, in practice the relationship with customers became disparate. This can be seen in the years of systematic price rises for the journals, which far outstripped the rate of inflation. Their unique position discourages many publishers from changing their lucrative business models. The model in which the author pays for his/her inclusion reduces the publisher’s power and control over the publication cycle. There is little doubt that increasing pressure from the clients (universities), financiers, political circles and the authors themselves will alter the publishers’ position, but it is currently difficult to predict how fast this will happen and what the long-term implications of the changes will be.