Kurt Paulus has written a summary of the ALPSP conference, The Web and after: the future of scholarly e-publishing (London, April 8, 2005). Excerpt: 'David Nicholas [from the CIBER centre at University College London]...suggested that growth in institutional repositories and open access will 'add to the digital fog' and may lead to stratification of services: first class (paid) and standard class (free)....David Hoole of Nature Publishing Group...[reported that Nature] is also investing in the required technical infrastructure to allow for syndication, personalization of news feeds (Urchin), reference management (Connotea) and looking at both sponsored and author-pays open access. Nature of course comes from a position of strength and has an array of content that can be more easily developed into new products than can conventional small research journals. It also has the benefit of substantial advertising revenues not accessible to most scholarly publishers....At the US National Academy of Sciences, as Diane Sullenberger explained, the Proceedings (PNAS) are run as a break-even operation, deriving revenue solely from authors and subscribers. In addition to giving free access after six months, and a free archive back to volume 1, PNAS is pushing out the boat on paid-for open access ($1000/article) and is finding that the proportion is increasing – 16% in 2005 so far, varying with subject. OA papers are certainly read more and sooner, but it is not yet clear whether they are cited more and sooner or whether OA will encourage subscription cancellations.' (Thanks to Colin Steele.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/01/2005 10:12:00 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.
