College & Research Libraries (C&RL) is offering free online access to its accepted articles during the period after peer review and before publication. From today's announcement:
College & Research Libraries (C&RL), the bi-monthly scholarly journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), is pleased to announce the launch of an open access, pre-publication service for accepted articles. The pre-print service, which made its debut in March 2008, moved to an open access model in an effort to make timely new research articles available to a wider audience....
"We're pleased to make these pre-print articles openly available," said ACRL Executive Director Mary Ellen Davis. "Drawing on our long-standing concerns for the health of scholarly communication, ACRL continues to experiment with our access and business models as a publisher. We encourage our members to join us in exploring open access and other strategies to ensure the future of high-quality scholarship and journals." ...
C&RL has an acceptance rate of 30 to 40 percent [and authors] wait approximately a year for formal appearance in the print. Such long timelines are common in traditional scholarly journal publishing, but are becoming less acceptable in new digital and networked scholarly communications....
The addition of pre-print articles makes important new writing and ideas in academic librarianship available to the public in a much timelier manner. C&RL pre-prints are fully vetted articles that are ready for publication pending only final copy editing and space in an upcoming issue. Once formally published, the pre-publication articles will be removed and the final, copy edited version of the article made available online....
Comments
When this program began in March 2008, free online access was limited to ACRL members. ACRL is lifting that restriction and extending free online access to everyone. That's a welcome change. Note, however, that the free online access is temporary. After C&RL publishes an article, it takes the free version offline and limits access to the published version to ACRL members.
Note that C&RL is talking about articles which have been peer-reviewed but not copy-edited. Most people I know call these postprints, not preprints. I only point this out to help OAN readers understand the new policy. The journal is creating free online pre-publication access for peer-reviewed manuscripts. (Most OA people use the term "preprint" to mean any version prior to peer review, such as the version the author submits to a journal, and use the term "postprint" to mean any version approved by peer review.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/06/2008 04:14:00 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.
