Sophie Rovner, Evolving Access, Chemical & Engineering News, July 3, 2006. Excerpt:
Publishers are striving to find a viable business model to support free reader access to scholarly articles on the Web.
Britain's Royal Society, which already provides free access to its articles 12 months after publication, has launched a trial of immediate open access for its seven journals. Authors whose papers are accepted by these journals now have the option to pay the society $370 to $550 per page to make the articles free to nonsubscribers as soon as they are published online. The fees, which will be discounted in the trial's first year, are set at a level that will sustain the journals if all authors choose immediate open access and subscription revenue drops to zero.
Elsevier recently instituted an open-access trial that will eventually involve 36 of its journals. An author who wants all readers to have immediate free online access to a paper in one of these journals can pay the company a $3,000 fee....
Meanwhile, Research Councils UK has updated its position on access to research results. Beginning in October, three of RCUK's eight member councils, which are Britain's leading public funders of science, will require grant recipients to deposit their articles in open-access repositories.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/03/2006 08:57:00 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.
