The OA HSRC Press in South Africa has gotten a good write-up at Open Business. Since I've blogged the HSRC press here before (1, 2), what I'd really like to point out is that Open Business is ready to cover the business of scholarly publishing.
OB describes itself as "a platform for sharing innovative Open Business ideas - entrepreneurial ideas which are built around openness, free services and free access." Its motto is Let's share business models. To that end, it has a blog, a summary of the models, a growing bibliography, and a wiki to "help create the authorative source on open business models".
Ever since Cara Kaufman and Alma Wills showed that only 47% of existing OA journals charge author-side fees, it's been clear that the majority of OA journals use business models that haven't been well-described in the literature. It would be very labor-intensive for researchers to contact all those journals, interview them on their business models, and post the results somewhere. The OB wiki is an ideal solution. How about creating a section in the wiki on peer-reviewed OA journals and slowly fleshing it out with the business models actually in use and some notes (data preferred) on how well they work?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/11/2005 07:30:00 AM.
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.
