Scholarly Communication: Scholarly Societies with Open Access Journals Archives

ISSUES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

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November 15, 2007

Scholarly Societies with Open Access Journals

Scholars are often concerned that if their society journal becomes "open access", subscription revenues to their society will dry up. Many learned societies are very interested in offering their articles to the widest possible audience, which OA offers, but are concerned about the sustainability of business models that provide for open access.

Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber have recently begun a two-phase project to look at OA publication initiatives from learned societies.

The goal of phase one is to make a comprehensive list of scholarly societies worldwide that support gold OA for their own journals - this is often referred to as the author-pays model. In the preliminary spreadsheet, they've divided the journals into those that are fully open access (currently 478 journals) and those that follow a hybrid model (72 journals) where some of the articles are open and others are not.

Among the information that is being gathered:
Journal title
Scholarly Society name
URL
Publisher
Copyright
Geographic location
Subject
Field (STM, HUM, ARTS, SS, Multi)
Print edition
Submission fee
Publication / Page charge
ISI Impact Factor
Where indexed
Date OA starts

Once they have secured funding, the authors plan to probe the societies to "learn details about their turn to OA, their business models, and the financial and academic consequences of their OA policies."

Access the most recent spreadsheet:
http://www.co-action.net/projects/OAsocieties/OAsocieties.xls

Posted by Katie Newman at November 15, 2007 10:39 AM