IMPORTANT CHANGES TO THE AIMS AND SCOPE OF THE JOURNAL...
EAP runs a strict open access policy. Therefore, the journal offers authors a unique and invaluable forum to disseminate their views on emerging and controversial topics.....
[W]e offer the interested readership free and full access to the content published in EAP.
As a novelty, EAP papers will also appear in RePEC, an international public-access database that promotes scholarly communication in economics and related disciplines, covering more than 144,000 articles from leading journals in the discipline....
OPEN ACCESS TO THE JOURNAL
It is clear that authors wish that their papers be as widely disseminated as possible and readers wish to access papers as soon as possible without inconvenience, financial and non financial. An open access policy addresses these important issues while at the same time giving much needed publicity to the journal and its authors. We observe that in 2003 approximately 21,000 refereed journals were published worldwide (Getz 2004). Of these, nearly 57 percent were made available online reaching a global electronic audience. However, not all of them were free. We believe that an open-source method will help to distribute and increase the readership of EAP worldwide in a faster manner. A study published in Nature reports that there is a strong correlation between the number of times an article has been cited and the probability that the article was online. The study concludes that “to maximize impact, minimize redundancy and speed scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access (Lawrence 2001, p. 521). Thus, it is a timely policy strategy to make EAP easily accessible. The ‘current issue’ papers will appear in the home page of the journal. Others can be accessed via the journal archives.
Thanks to Christian Zimmerman on the RePEc blog for the alert and for this additional information:
Economic Analysis and Policy (EAP) is a 38 year old journal published by the Economic Society of Australia (Queensland branch) that has just adopted an open access policy. To celebrate this important step, EAP intends to publish in 2009 a special issue on the Economics of publishing, with special reference to different business models, like the commercial, university press, open access and pre-print models. Academic publishing is undergoing a profound transformation that we wish to better understand....
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.
