Funding for publishers willing to trial open access (OA) publishing has allayed concerns about the OA business model, according to JISC. Its three-year project to fund and endorse publishers introducing the OA model has acted as a catalyst to publishers’development of open access, according to a report by Key Perspectives.
In addition to offering financial support to publishers as they developed their OA model, JISC paid some or all of the authors’ fees that would normally have been charged by the publishers. Of the authors participating, 23% said this allowed them to publish in journals they would not have otherwise published in....
JISC has come in for criticism over its decision to support publishers though. Stevan Harnad, said: “The work JISC has been doing to promote open access journals has been positive and useful, but, in my own opinion, it has nevertheless been a waste of time and money, compared to what JISC could have done instead. JISC could and should be throwing all its (OA) efforts and resources into promoting OA self-archiving into institutional repositories.”...
Fred Friend, scholarly communications consultant, said JISC will continue to work on both routes to open access, probably as separate strands: “It is partly political to keep them separate so that we can help publishers with the conversion of their business models without ill will about repositories. JISC does not believe repositories are a threat to publishers, but publishers believe they are.”
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/13/2006 12:14:00 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.
