Wiley has launched a hybrid journal program. From yesterday's press release:
Global publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., today announced a new funded access service for authors of journal articles. Through this new program, authors will have the option of paying a fee to ensure that their article is available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley InterScience, Wiley's online publishing platform, as well as the author's funding agency's preferred archive if applicable.
"Wiley developed the funded access program as a response to journal authors whose funding might have certain requirements," said Mike Davis, Vice President, Global Life and Medical Sciences. "For those authors who want to publish in a Wiley journal, and whose funding agency requires deposit in an archive, this new program supports these requirements."
As an initial offering, funded access will be available for 45 biomedical journals. Only authors of primary research articles qualify for this new service, and only those authors whose articles have been accepted for publication will be offered the funded access option at the point when the article is accepted, to ensure that the funded access option has no influence on the peer review and acceptance process.
Wiley will deposit the final PDF of the article into the funder's archive; this is the final, authoritative version of the article, after peer review, editing, any final corrections, online and print formatting, and publication. The fee for ensuring articles are made available through the funded access program is $3,000 per article.
[See the press release for the 45 participating journals.]
Comments.
Like other hybrid journal programs, Wiley's is a welcome step. It's welcome insofar as it enlarges the body of free online literature. (Wiley doesn't use the term open access.) But like some other hybrid programs, this one has flaws. The author-side fee is high, which will probably lead to a low level of author uptake. (At least nobody should conclude that low uptake indicates low interest in OA.) Wiley will not apparently let participating authors retain copyright, will not lower subscription prices in proportion to author uptake, will not waive the fee in cases of economic hardship, and will not allow deposits in OA repositories (outside Wiley's control) unless required by the author's funder.
Wiley will charge authors who want to provide free online access to the published editions of their articles, even when authors are bound by a mandate from their funder. But most funder OA policies apply to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition. Wiley doesn't say whether it would charge fees for authors who want to comply with funder mandates in that form. It shouldn't. Publishers have no right to interfere with funder-grantee contracts, especially when the funder contract comes first and the publisher contract comes second.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/09/2006 09:28:00 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.
