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.html
SPARC, ARL, and ACRL have published a brochure on open access.
http://www.createchange.org/resources/brochure.html
deletion
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
