Some resources that may be of help in framing responses on the question of embargoes:
Washington D.C. Principles For Free Access to Science - A Statement from Not-for-Profit Publishers On March 16, 2004, "representatives from the nation’s leading not-for- profit medical/scientific societies and publishers announced their commitment to providing free access and wide dissemination of published research findings". The publishing principles and practices supported by this group include: 3. As not-for-profit publishers, we have introduced and will continue to support the following forms of free access:... The full text of our journals is freely available to everyone worldwide either immediately or within months of publication, depending on each publisher’s business and publishing requirements; The DC Principles can be found here: http://www.dcprinciples.org/ In other words, this very traditional group of scholarly society publishers committed, back in 2004, to making their journals freely available either immediately or within months of publication. There are a number of indications that this is now a common practice - many fully open access journals, and many more that provide free access to back issues on a purely voluntary basis, frequently with a 12-month delay. The extent of this practice may be best viewed in the Electronic Journals Library (EZB). The EZB is a collaborative project of 589 libraries, based in Germany, that collects both subscription and free "scientific and academic full text journals". EZB currently includes 38,066 journals - close to 30,000 more titles than are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is limited to fully OA journals. Among the 30,000 journals are a very large number of journals that voluntarily provide free access to back issues, with no policy requirement. http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/about.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en A quick scan of the journals participating in Highwire Free illustrates that a 12-month embargo is very common for these kinds of journals: http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl The number of journals voluntarily contributing to PubMedCentral has been growing steadily - from 410 in March 2008 to 1,464 at the end of 2012. Of these, over 1,000 voluntarily provide all content for immediate free access. Data here is from The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2012.html A key point is that this data illustrates that a great many traditional scholarly journals have made the decision to provide free back to their journals with a minimal embargo period, with one year being common. Many such journals made this step with some concern about the potential impact on their subscriptions and revenue. If there had been dire consequences for such journals, there would be plenty of data today to demonstrate that providing free access after a brief embargo harms subscriptions. No such data has ever been brought forward to my knowledge. It might be reasonable to say that providing free access to back issues is rapidly becoming the norm for scholarly journals, and so this might be a recommendation for a maximum embargo for OA policy. best, Heather Morrison, PhD Freedom for scholarship in the internet age https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530 _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
