New milestones in open access publishing | Elsevier Connect

"At Elsevier, we too have been scaling our open access publishing program, and we're marking the launch of our 100th open access journal: Case Reports in Women's Health. However, it is not only the launch of this title or the actual number of new journals we are celebrating, but all the opportunities open access has created to bring publication choices to researchers. For our part, we have done this by working with the different research communities to launch open access journals, provide open access options in existing titles and continue to establish programs to help expand public access. Elsevier fully supports the goal to make scientific research publically available, and we are encouraged by authors' enthusiasm and uptake of this option. In fact last year, at Elsevier we published over 6,000 author-paid open access articles, as well as a multiple of that under centrally-paid open access models. We recognize the importance of offering publication choices to our authors, since we also published over 330,000 subscription-based articles in 2013 – 20,000 more than the previous year ... Creating new open access journals at Elsevier has been about identifying and addressing real needs in the research community. One such journal,Methods X, was was launched after a survey of authors revealed that a staggering 80 percent of their time was taken up adjusting technical protocols in order to make them work in their particular setting. We discovered that most of this work was not actually published yet can benefit other researchers, saving them time and enhancing the reproducibility of published research. By creating a new outlet for publishing the small but important customizations authors make to methods every day, we can bring extra credit to authors and greater efficiency for researchers.  Research data is another area where our open access journals are helping to create visibility and facilitate reproducibility for data-driven research. The latest open access data journal, Genomics Data, brings interpretation to complicated datasets. The journal provides a way for genomics researchers to bring their data – along with the details necessary to understand and reuse the data – to the wider community ... Another milestone has been to expand open access options in our established journals. All authors publishing in Elsevier journals now have the option to publish gold or green open access, creating over 1,600 hybrid journals. These new options have been valuable for authors, who can continue to publish in well-known and respected titles and also make their research open access. This way, the hybrid OA option provides a platform for OA transition within existing journal communities ... We have also been actively working with the wider research community to establish agreements with funders and institutions. These help us design and implement workflows that make it easier for authors to publish in Elsevier journals and comply with the open access policies of their funders and institutions.  We have also been involved in a number of pilots around open access. For example, we have supported the SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) initiative, a new program that centrally supports the open access fees needed to fund open access journals in this community. This collaboration has also involved flipping two of our subscription titles to open access in January — Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B.  Elsevier is also continuing to help expand access to research by participating in new industry initiatives. Recently, Elsevier participated in and supported the Access to Research initiative, which gives the UK public free access to academic research at their public libraries. In the US, we are participating in a pilot called CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States), which aims to