"Open Access," says Ahmed Hindawi – the Egyptian journal publisher who, over a 10-year period, has built an entire line of journals on the author pays model – "is simply good business."
As of Feb. 21, 2007, a date he says he will always remember, the once conventional publisher completely converted his company to a new economic model; and himself, to a new way of operating a journal publishing business....
[W]hen he launched his Hindawi journal publishing business in 1997 he meant to operate as a classic publisher, offering initially a line of 30 titles in print and on a subscription basis.
He learned quickly, however, that "the market did not favor a small start-up." Hindawi experimented with a single Open Access journal – offered on the author pays model–in 2003 and found the uptake "encouraging." Over the ensuing years he says he saw the barriers disappear.
"When the author (or the author’s institution) pays up-front for a peer-reviewed paper to be published, "the journal is profitable from day 1," he noted, and no subscriptions need to be sold....
In the Hindawi approach, the publisher makes a living, and the user–any user–gets access to the corpus for free.
Sounds like a perfect world, doesn’t it? ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/03/2008 03:11:00 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.
