The Journal of Experimental Botany has adopted the Walker-Prosser OA model. From Managing Editor Mary Traynor's explanation in the July 2004 issue: "From July 2004 authors of research papers published in the JXB will have the option to pay a small fee ($400) in return for making their paper immediately freely available online. If authors choose not to pay then their paper will remain under the usual subscription control. This Open Access experiment arises from a commitment to maximize exposure and extend availability, but why is such a radical approach necessary? Accessibility to the complete scientific literature is gradually assuming more importance as search techniques expand our horizons....Limited library budgets, increasing publication and subscription costs, and the introduction of the Big Deals in which libraries subscribe to large collections of journals all result in small, independent, often society-owned journals being squeezed out. If this situation continues a limited number of large journals will develop editorial monopolies potentially dictating the direction of research. A freely-available scientific literature would bring many additional benefits. It is a step towards an inclusive global community. Students from high school to PhD would be guaranteed access to all that they were interested in and the free availability of information would lend confidence to an ever more suspicious general public. Many small journals like the JXB are owned by learned societies that use profits to support very worthwhile work. In author-pays business models profits will be limited and may even dry up, so what is the future for the societies? Well it is up to them!" JXB is published for the Society for Experimental Biology by Oxford University Press. (Thanks to Charles W. Bailey, Jr.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/25/2004 03:42:00 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.
