Open access repositories are beginning to push academic publishers off their previously unreachable perch. | Impact of Social Sciences

Connotea Imports 2012-07-31

Summary:

"George Monbiot likes to stir things up.  Writing for the Guardian newspaper on 29 August, he denounced academic publishers as 'privateers', taking unjustified profits from the public world of research. 'You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy', Monbiot wrote, 'in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50'... We put a huge amount of effort into research that is partly funded from public money, substantially supported by our own time. We write peer reviews for journals, sit on editorial boards and edit special editions of journals, making the results of research widely available. When we come to publish ourselves, we often surrender our copyright in full, including our right ever to reprint or distribute our papers. But then our university libraries have to pay substantial subscriptions (that increase annually at rates significantly above general inflation) so that our colleagues and students can read our work. And, in a final turn of the screw, we are invited to pay a large amount of money so that we can send our own papers to our colleagues and collaborators without risk of prosecution (I was recently offered a special price of $3000 for this privilege)... What is less well known is that, irrespective of the contract for final publication, it is quite legal to make the final draft of a publication available to anyone in an open access repository. This is not an ideal way to go; such versions will not have the correct pagination, illustrations and figures may not be as published, and there will often be minor editorial changes made to the published version. But it’s better than forcing someone who wants to check through your work as part of a general literature review to pay $30 or more.  And, of course, an increasing number of progressive publishers are offering “green” open access publishing, which makes the final version openly available.

These options have fuelled a quiet revolution in disseminating knowledge that is bypassing the tollgates that the publishers have set up.  The admirable Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), hosted at the University of Southampton, now monitors well over one hundred repositories in Britain, and some eighty of these serve individual universities.  We are well on the way to having one million individual papers open, free of charge, to anyone on this basis... There are many good reasons for making research available on an open access basis. One of these is self interest.  The evidence is now incontrovertible that putting a paper in an open access repository may significantly increase citations, often dramatically..."

Link:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/10/10/open-access-ripositories/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Connotea Imports
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

ru.no oa.new oa.publishers oa.green oa.business_models oa.licensing oa.comment oa.copyright oa.ir oa.impact oa.costs oa.prices oa.profits oa.citations oa.benefits oa.roar oa.u.southampton oa.versions oa.repositories oa.libre

Authors:

petersuber

Date tagged:

07/31/2012, 12:25

Date published:

10/11/2011, 08:17