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Re: Stop fighting the inevitable - and free funds for open access!

Ahmed:

My reply was not about Hindawi's publishing practices, but thanks for your interesting description of them.

Rather, it was about a common misunderstanding between some Gold-road OA advocates and conventional publishers about the cost of e-journal production. For a significant number of small OA journals published out of university departments and libraries, the costs I outlined are in effect. This is a very different model than is used by mainstream publishers, be they commercial, university press, or large association publishers. This significant difference of "business models" can lead to very understandable difficulties in dialogs about costs. The model I outlined can work for certain types of journals, but this does not mean that it scales up well and can be used without modification for all types of journals.

This quote from my paper "What Is Open Access?" may help to explain this further:

Non-Traditional Publishers: During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Internet had developed to the point that scholars began to publish free digital journals utilizing existing institutional infrastructure and volunteer labor (e.g., EJournal, PostModern Culture, and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review). These journals were not intended to generate income; they were "no-profit" journals. Although many of these journals allowed authors to retain their copyrights and they had liberal copyright statements regarding noncommercial use, they preceded by a decade or more the Creative Commons, and, consequently, did not embody that kind of copyright stance. While some of these journals ceased publication and others were transformed into non-profit ventures, they provided a model that others followed, especially after the popularization of the Internet began in the mid-1990s, which followed the earlier introduction of Web browsers.

In recent years, the availability of free open source journal management and publishing systems, such as the Open Journal Systems, further simplified and streamlined digital journal publishing, fueling additional growth in this area. Now, a wide variety of academic departments or schools, institutes and research centers, libraries, professional associations, scholars, and others publish digital journals, a subset of which comply with the strictest definition of an open access journal and a larger subset which comply with the looser definition of an open access journal as a free journal. Since these diverse "publishers" would have been unlikely to be engaged in this activity without facilitating digital technologies and tools, I refer to them as "non-traditional publishers." Many of them are also "no-profit" publishers as well.

Best Regards,

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
E-Mail: cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com
Publications: http://www.digital-scholarship.org/


Ahmed Hindawi wrote:

> Charles:
>
> Since Sally was pointing out to Hindawi's OA publication fees,
> I'd like to reply to your points below:

[SNIP]