"The facts about open access" journals

["\"FrederickFriend\"" <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

The recent ALPSP report on "The facts about open access" is a valuable
contribution to our understanding of the journals route to open access,
and I pay tribute to the sponsors of this report. It would have been more
helpful if the word "journals" had been added to the title, because the
report does not cover open access itself but one particular - albeit
important - route to open access. It may not be within ALPSP's remit, but
from other organizations we need similar studies on the repository route
to open access, on the effects of open access to scientific databases and
on the cost-benefits to society in open access developments.

By and large the report is fair and balanced, with some perhaps inevitable
bias towards the existing journal publication system. The third
"conclusion", that "peer review and copy-editing may be less rigorous with
full open access journals", is not factual, being based upon an assumption
that internal review and new forms like post-publication review are less
rigorous than conventional peer review.  And the "online usage" statistics
in Table 23 do not appear to have been adjusted to reflect the fact that
DOAJ journals usually contain fewer articles, an adjustment which would
give a fairer picture of the article download and full text page view
situation. It would also have given a fairer picture of open access
journal income if the facts in Table 24 about the substantial numbers of
print subscriptions open access journals are often able to attract had
been highlighted.

Many of the facts in the report, as is acknowledged in Sally Morris' good
"Introduction", reflect the youth of open access journals, and therefore
cause no surprise. The finding I find most fascinating is that "most
journals surveyed are planning to test or adopt a different business model
in the next three years". The study undertaken by Mary Waltham for JISC on
learned society business models demonstrated that the current dependence
upon institutional subscriptions cannot be relied upon to provide a secure
future, and the news that so many journals are looking for change is good
news for us all. My appeal to publishers is to discuss their plans more
openly with those organizations and individuals who wish them well. I
agree with Sally that we need more factual studies of the changes taking
place in scholarly communication, and there may be ways in which the work
of JISC and other organizations can build upon the results of the ALPSP
study.

Fred Friend
JISC Consultant
OSI Open Access Advocate
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
E-mail ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk