Steady, strong growth is expected for open-access journals: Physics Today: Vol 70, No 5
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-03
Summary:
"In the more than 15 years since the advent of open-access (OA) journals, scientific publishers who once viewed them as an existential threat are now operating their own. But despite double-digit growth in OA, scientific societies and commercial publishers alike agree that the vast bulk of their publications will remain wedded to the traditional subscription model for the foreseeable future.
'Open access is much less of a contentious issue now,' says H. Frederick Dylla, retired executive director of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today. 'It’s happening. It’s a business model.' Of more concern to publishers today is the illicit posting of papers on article-sharing services. By some estimates, such as a 2014 report prepared for the European Commission, more than half of the scientific literature from 2007 to 2012 was accessible for free online. But it’s unclear how much of that content consists of papers that infringe on publishers’ copyrights because they are freely accessible despite licenses that are supposed to keep them behind paywalls."