Re: Revoked Open Access?

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

What are the "opportunity costs" of the funds provided by "the 
major institutions active in particle physics"? I.e., is they 
were not being used to pay OA fees, would they be used to support 
more research, more conferences, or what? One cannot truly 
evaluate the benefits of OA unless one knows what the alternative 
uses of the funds might be.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press


>Dear Ian,
>
>Thanks for the nice comments on JHEP.
>
>The Journal of High Energy Physics was born back in 1997, as a
>"Community Journal". It was probably a little bit too early to be
>successful with such a "naive" business model, and the alliance
>with IOP Publishing was then necessary to the survival of the
>Journal.
>
>Almost two years ago we launched a new hybrid Open Access
>initiative called the Institutional Membership Fee
>(http://jhep.sissa.it/jhep/docs/SISSA_IOP_OA_proposal.pdf)
>together with IOPP. This initiative proved to be successful: some
>20% of the papers published in JHEP are now Open Access, thanks
>to the support of some of the major institutions active in
>particle physics. This business model offers an Open Access
>alternative at a very low cost, often comparable to the cost of a
>subscription.
>
>Since the launch of the OA initiative, JHEP increased its share 
>of HEP publishing from 15% to 25% (Robert Aymar, Scholarly 
>communication in high-energy physics: Past, present and future 
>innovations, CERN-OPEN-2008-015, to appear in European Review. 
>http://doc.cern.ch//archive/electronic/other/generic/public/cer-000700329.pdf), 
>a result that clearly shows the advantage of OA publishing.
>
>JINST, a sibling Journal jointly published by Sissa and IOPP, 
>has an even higher percentage of Open Access papers, including 
>the recently published complete scientific documentation of the 
>CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine and detectors 
>(http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=3Dextra.lhc/jinst). JINST 
>has been singled out by CERN for this publication thanks to the 
>many advantages that this model offer to the community: High 
>Quality, Open Access, no-author-fees and low cost.
>
>Best regards,
>Enrico
>
>-----Messaggio originale-----
>Da: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] Per conto di Ian Russell
>RE: Revoked Open Access?
>
>Journal of High Energy Physics was published as a free to 
>authors and free to readers publication by SISSA (the 
>International School for Advanced Studies).  This became 
>financially unsustainable and the journal was then co-published 
>with the Institute of Physics Publishing under a subscription 
>model.  I understand that there is now the option of paying an 
>'institutional membership fee' which entitles readers in that 
>institution to access all articles in the journal regardless of 
>the status of the paper, and authors in that institution to 
>publish articles on author pays Open Access terms. These 
>articles are therefore made freely available to the entire 
>world. There is a commitment to guarantee Open Access to these 
>articles in future years.
>
>Ian Russell, ALPSP