The impact of open access for publishers, authors, and readers was the subject of a one day conference held in London last week, organised by Oxford Journals. Findings presented from three studies conducted by LISU, CIBER, and Oxford Journals, gave researchers a rare opportunity to view how the open access business model is working in practice....
"Until recently there has been a lack of data to support whether an open access model would result in cost effective dissemination of research," commented Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Oxford Journals, who also chaired the event...."The event has received strong support from across the scholarly community, for presenting hard evidence into the effects of open access,and also for enabling others to share their experiences of open access. We hope that by making the results of our experiments public we can help to foster a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of open access and subscription-based business models."
The day focussed on the preliminary findings from three key experiments relating to Oxford Journals open access content. Findings were presented by Claire Saxby, Senior Editor, Oxford Journals; Claire Creaser, LISU; and David Nicholas, CIBER. Some of the key findings included:
The importance of search engines in driving up usage
The relationship of open access driving up usage of non-open access content in the same journal
Changes in user behaviour for abstract and full-text usage
The varying standpoints of authors on open access.
Presentations from Oxford Journals, LISU, and CIBER, are now available online. A full report of the findings will be freely available online from the Oxford Journals website later this month....
Here's how OUP describes the "three key experiments" whose results were reported at the workshop:
Oxford currently has three separate open access models: one full open access journal, Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), optional open access for 49 journals in the Oxford Open initiative, and sponsored open access for Journal of Experimental Botany (JXB), and Evidence based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (eCAM).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/13/2006 08:39:00 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.
