The Canadian Journal of Communication is just one example of a large number of small society / association journals, published by scholars for scholars. While not fully open access, CJC is a good role model in many respects.
Subscription rates are $100 - $165 year (depending on print / online, etc.). Like many such journals, CJC has never been in the practice of raising subscription prices at rates above inflation year after year as many commercial publishers have. Journals like CJC did not create the crisis in scholarly communication, but many have been affected by it (libraries have had to cancel many journals like CJC, even at such low rates, to pay for the big publishers' big deals.) Subscription information can be found here: http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/about/subscriptions CJC makes all of its issues freely available after one year, using the CC-BY-NC-ND license. This is a voluntary action which is not at all required by any funding agency policy. The CJC statement on this policy clearly indicates that the purpose of publication is dissemination of scholarly work, not making money for everyone - details: "The journal takes the stance that the publication of scholarly research is meant to disseminate knowledge and, in a not-for-profit regime, benefits neither publisher nor author financially. It sees itself as having an obligation to its authors and to society to make content available online now that the technology allows for such a possibility. In keeping with this principle, the journal has published all of its back issues online. At the same time, were an author who contributed to the journal prior to the journal putting in place an explicit request for online rights to request that his or her work be removed from the CJC-Online website, the journal would remove the work. Authors who publish in the Canadian Journal of Communication agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada Licence" from: http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines On self-archiving, CJC is romeo blue - self-archiving of peer-reviewed postprint okay, preprints unclear. This may be more a reflection of the UK / large international publisher focus of Sherpa RoMEO rather than CJC per se, i.e. it is not clear whether anyone has worked very hard with publishers like this to encourage and clarify self-archiving rights. CJC's policies are far from perfect - I'm not crazy about the charging for coursepacks through Access Copyright, for example - however journals like this did not create the problem in scholarly publishing, and considering the low cost of journal subscriptions, it should be possible for libraries to figure out how to support journals like this to thrive in a fully open access future. If there are small society journals like this in the UK, my suggestion is that RCUK look into providing infrastructure and support for them so that they can move into an online OA future, assuming RCUK can afford to subsidize publishing. my two bits, Heather Morrison _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
