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Thursday, May 01, 2008

Profile of Hindawi Publishing

Marji McClure, Case Study: Open Access Yields Solid Growth for Hindawi, Information Today, May 1, 2008.  Excerpt:

...Hindawi, which was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt, was just like any other publisher for its first 10 years of business. But that changed in February 2007 when Hindawi, which had started to test the waters of open access (OA) journal articles a few years earlier, completed its full conversion to an OA publishing model....

Hindawi’s OA initiative and the company’s commitment to the pro­cess received a boost last November when it formed a partnership with SAGE....The alliance calls for the publishers to jointly publish a collection of OA journals....

SAGE will develop and market the journals, while Hindawi will provide the technological, editorial, and production infrastructure that will run the journals, according to [Paul Peters, head of business development for Hindawi]. He says the companies will each have 50% ownership of the journals and will equally split revenues generated by the publications....

Peters adds that Hindawi doesn’t have any other partnerships in place, but the company is interested in building additional alliances....

On its own, Hindawi currently publishes more than 100 peer-reviewed journals in the STM space and expects to publish roughly 3,000–4,000 journal articles in 2008....

Hindawi’s journals are published under the OA model...[and] distributed under the Creative Commons attribution license, which allows for the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the articles. Article authors maintain the copyright to their work....

A print-on-demand service enables readers to access the journals in printed form....Authors pay for the publication of their work through article processing charges, which can range from € 400 to € 1,000 (about $600 to $1,500) per article, says Peters.

“Apart from their business model, these journals are run much the same way that traditional subscription-based journals are run,” he says. “All of our journals have a thorough peer-review process, and we reject about 60% of the articles that are submitted to our journals.” ...

[T]he company has grown substantially since the total OA conversion. Hindawi received about 6,000 submissions in the 12 months after the conversion, a 60% increase from the previous year, Peters says. Hindawi also launched about 40 new journal titles during that time....“We have been very pleased with [our] ability to grow since converting to open access, and we expect to maintain very rapid growth over the next several years,” he says....

“Although many of our journals are only a few years old, we have seen quite a few of them become very successful in terms of visibility, prestige, and reputation,” he says....