Professional Engineering Publishing, publishers to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, have launched a new open access service for the engineering community called Engineering Open Choice.
Engineering Open Choice gives authors the option of having their published research made available free to anyone throughout the world, on an open access basis. The service is available to authors of all papers accepted for publication, upon payment of a standard fee. Engineering Open Choice is designed to satisfy the needs of the community - authors, funding bodies, readers - who want research material to be made available on an open access basis.
Engineering Open Choice will be available in all Journals published by Professional Engineering Publishing, most notably the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
Also see PEP's Overview of Engineering Open Choice. I'd post an excerpt here but the PDF is locked and doesn't permit cutting/pasting. (Why?) A few details:
The option will be available before the end of 2007.
The Engineering Open Choice (EOC) articles will be included in the same abstracting and indexing services as PEP's ordinary articles.
The publication fee is £1,700. Color charges are extra. EU authors must also pay VAT.
The EOC edition is the final published edition of the article.
EOC articles are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 license.
PEP guarantees that EOC articles will be free online at the PEP site "for a minimum of 10 years from the date of publication" but authors are also allowed to deposit EOC article in the repositories of their choice from the moment of publication.
Comments.
This is policy meets many of my criteria for a hybrid journal program. In particular, I'm impressed that OEC articles are the published editions, are released under CC licenses, and may be deposited in repositories independent of the publisher.
PEP leaves three important questions unanswered. (1) Will it reduce its subscription prices in proportion to author uptake? (2) Will authors have to pay the EOC publication fee in order to comply with a prior funding contract? (3) Will PEP retreat from its current green self-archiving policy by requiring either a fee for no-embargo self-archiving or an embargo for no-fee self-archiving?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/20/2007 01:30:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
