Dear Sara & Lars,
I have a suggestion for correcting one of your criteria for being listed as
an Open Access Journal in DOAJ:
http://www.doaj.org/articles/about/#criteria
Currently, it reads:
2.1 Cost: Journals that use a funding model that charges users or
their institutions are not included.
I think there is a big ambiguity here: Clearly a journal whose full
content you can only access via individual or institutional tolls is not
an open-access journal. But what about a journal that continues to charge
access-tolls to those who are able (and willing) to pay them yet also
commits itself to making all of its contents immediately and permanently
accessible toll-free online (i.e., open access) as well? (E.g., Cortex,
which is, rightly, included, but does not fit the present DOAJ definition).
It is critically important that the open-access movement should not narrow
itself down to become "the movement for changing the cost-recovery model
for journal publishing." It is the movement for immediate, permanent,
toll-free, full-text online access to all journal articles. Hence every
journal that commits itself to providing permanent open access should
be acknowledged to be an open-access journal irrespective of whether it
still also offers a toll-access version.
I suggest changing the above to:
2.1 Cost: Journals that use a funding model that charges all users or
their institutions are not included. However, journals that continue
to charge subscribing users or their institutions to cover their
costs but also provide immediate, permanent, toll-free full-text
online access to everyone else are included.
Best wishes,
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Hypermail Archive:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
