Abstract: Research manuscripts face various time lags from initial submission to final publication in a scientific periodical. Three publishing models compete for the market. Professional publishing houses publish in print and/or online in a “reader-pays” model, or follow the open access model of “author-pays”, while a number of periodicals are bound to learned societies. The present study aims to compare the three business models of publishing, with regards to publication speed. 28 topically similar biomedical journals were compared. Open access journals have a publication lag comparable to journals published by traditional publishers. Manuscript submitted to and accepted in either of these two types of periodicals are available to the reader much faster than manuscripts published in journals with strong ties to specialized learned societies.
Comments
I won't comment on the overall argument, since I don't have access to the article. But even the abstract shows that the authors presuppose that all OA journals charge publication fees when, in fact, most charge no fees at all.
...Though their method is marred by small sample sizes in the open access group, time from receipt to publication online compared well between traditional-publication and OA articles. Nature Publishing Group titles were selected as representative of the traditional model. However, I would have liked to have seen data for other titles - Nature publishes every week and is the biggest academic journal in the world. It may not be entirely typical in its editing processes and timeliness. Nature titles took on average 120 days from receipt to online publication. Open access titles from BioMed Central took on average 139 days....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/18/2008 12:10:00 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.
