This post is intended to provide a quick overview of my current research program, called Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. I am hoping to answer in advance some of the questions I get about my research.
Resource requirements for small scholar-led publishers In brief, until the end of World War II, almost all scholarly peer-reviewed journals were published by scholarly societies or independent scholar-publishers. In the decades since then, the commercial sector has taken on a growing role in scholarly publishing. The ease of online publishing makes it feasible to reverse this trend. I talk with editors of small scholar-led journals (societies and independents) to uncover what they need in terms of staff, technology, etc., to survive and thrive in an open access future. Open access article processing charges This is a longitudinal survey of the minority of fully open access publishers that use this business model. The purpose of this research is to identify early on trends, e.g. will this business model spur competition, or will it show the price rises year after year beyond inflation that happened with subscription journals. This is an open research approach. Details and links to datasets and results-to-date can be found here: http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ Macro study of the feasibility of a switch to OA - published in First Monday in 2013 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4370 In brief, the global spend of academic libraries is more than enough to fund a fully open access peer-reviewed journal system, and this could be accomplished at less than today's cost. However, prudence is required in the transition as the cost-effectiveness of OA will depend on the average cost per article. Note that I use this as a key metric, not as an indication of support for a particular business model. For example, a fully subsidized journal with no APCs will still have an average production cost. A major limitation of this study is that it is limited to fully OA journals. Another emerging area which I consider to be extremely important is the overlap between open access, creative commons, copyright, and licensing. In brief, I critique what I consider a common myth that open access is the same as the CC-BY license and I view Creative Commons in general with a critical lens. Early notes from this work can be found here:http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html<http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html> and here:http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2015/05/open-access-publishing-current-issues.html<http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2015/05/open-access-publishing-current-issues.html> with formal research and writing to follow. I am continuing the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series, and apologize that the September 30 2015 data has not yet been released. This is on my agenda when I can find the time. Questions and comments on my research are always welcome. Please note that I do not study publisher profits. At most, I refer from time to time to publicly posted financial results from companies such as Elsevier in order to illustrate the feasibility of switching to open access. It is easy to do this with publicly traded corporations as they are required to publish this information. Not all commercial publishers are publicly traded companies. If anyone knows of anyone doing research in this area, please post to the list as there does seem to be interest in the topic. -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa Desmarais 111-02 613-562-5800 ext. 7634 Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>
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