At 09:05 PM 6/28/2004 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Prior Topic Thread: "Re: A Role for SPARC in Freeing the Refereed Literature" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3806.htmlSPARC, ARL, and ACRL have published a brochure on open access. http://www.createchange.org/resources/brochure.html
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This is a somewhat muddled comparison: There are two ways to provide OA to an article: (1) to publish it in an OA journal or (2) to publish it in a TA (i.e., subscription-toll-based) journal *and* to self-archive it in an OA archive, as a supplement to the TA version, so all would-be users can access it, whether or not their institutions can afford to pay for access to the TA journal version.
In addition to OA and TA journals, there are journals that are both. These "OA/TA" journals offer OA to authors who are willing to pay for it; thus issues usually contain both OA and TA articles. The first publisher to switch its journals from OA to OA/TA was the Entomological Society of America. It did so in 2000, and the next year another publisher did the same. Now at least three other publishers have made one or more of their journals OA/TA. Publishers who have switched are enjoying substantial revenues from OA without foregoing their revenues from TA. At the same time they are providing a service that authors want and that TA journals do not offer. How much longer can the leaders of scientific societies resist earning a profit by offering the OA that many of their authors are willing to buy? An attribute of OA/TA journals is that they permit a direct comparison of the numbers of downloads for OA and TA articles. For example, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography discovered that the OA articles in its journal had been downloaded 2.8 times as often as TA articles after one year. After two years they had been downloaded 3.4 times as often. For particulars about OA/TA journals and their publishers, see "Open access by the article: an idea whose time has come?" at http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/13.html . For a presentation that describes open access by the article as one of two routes to open access, go to http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ALAtalk.htm . For still more on open access by the article go to http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ . Thomas J. Walker Professor Emeritus University of Florida Gainesville, FL
