Update from Multi-Science Publishing

["Okerson, Ann" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Through the transom and of possible interest.  Anyone know more 
about the European Knowledge Exchange Project?

______________________________________________________

From: Paul Bailey [mailto:paul@multi-science.co.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 4:23 AM
To: librarians@scholarlycommunication.org
Subject: RE: News from Multi-Science Publishing

Dear Colleague,

As a publisher, I have a keen interest in Open Access - at one 
level, the more people who see my content and can make use of it, 
the better. However, I have little faith in the presently mooted 
ways forward for Open Access. 'Author Pays' will not work; 
funding by philanthropic bodies fails the necessary long term 
test; as does the concept of setting up countless 'alternative' 
OA journals. Here, I want to describe a promising initiative we 
are engaged with, and to outline a way of quickly going much 
further.

We have been invited to participate in Knowledge Exchange (see 
www.knowledge-exchange.info) which is a consortium venture 
between the national libraries of Germany, Denmark, the 
Netherlands and the UK, whereby our content - having been 
validated by Knowledge Exchange - is being offered to all the 
universities in those countries, under the terms of Knowledge 
Exchange's licence, which is devised with the universities 
interests at heart, of course. Some countries will provide the 
content to the universities in their country by means of a 
national licence; others will provide matching funds for those 
universities which decide to opt-in. Not only does the licence 
protect the universities position, the pricing structure is 
extremely favourable: under some scenarios the 
price/journal/institution/year is about $25!

So, its quite a good OA start, to make our content available to 
all those universities, and higher education institutions, at 
such an eminently affordable price.

But we would like to go a lot further, partly from OA enthusiasm, 
and partly because so much of our content is essentially applied 
science and potentially has a much wider audience than university 
researchers.

Ideally, we would like to see national licences, perhaps 
organised and funded by a country's national library (or national 
digital library) so that any national of that country can access 
our content, at no cost at the point of use: free to users, in 
short. This is technically straightforward; the licence cost will 
be affordable. Most importantly, as trail blazing deals are made 
between Multi-Science and progressive national bodies, other 
publishers will feel the commercial need to follow, which opens 
up the possibility of countries acquiring vast amounts of 
excellent information, at negligible cost, for the benefit of all 
their citizens.

You can find out more about our company and publications at 
www.multi-science.co.uk and you can see specimens of content, 
tables of contents, abstracts, at 
www.ingentaconnect.com.content/mscp

I hope this is of interest, and would be pleased to hear any 
comments you might have. If you personally are in a position to 
drive matters forward, do please contact me; feel free to forward 
this message to colleagues who may also be interested.

Best wishes
W Hughes
Director
Multi-Science Publishing Co Ltd