Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Commercial publishers, too, realize that widespread dissemination of
the content that they publish is in everyone's interest. However, there
has to be a viable and sustainable business model behind an industry
that publishes 1.5 million research articles a year, and the debate within
publishing houses revolves primarily around this rather than ideological
arguments.
Two forms of OA seem to grab most of the headlines. In OA
publishing (often referred to as the 'gold route') the final publisher
version (the Version of Record) of the article is made freely available on
the web immediately on publication. This is usually funded by author-
side fees (for this reason often referred to as 'author pays', although in
practice it is often a funding body or other organization that actually
foots the bill), but a significant number of OA journals, more than half
in the case of non-profit publishers (Cox and Cox, 2008), are funded by
sponsorship, grants or subsidy from a parent institution or learned
society. In manuscript archiving or self-archiving (known as the 'green
route') authors deposit a version of their article in an open online
repository. But there are two other forms of OA that receive less
attention and yet are more widespread. In the delayed OA model the
final, Version of Record articles appearing in subscription journals are
made freely available after a certain period of time, while in the 'hybrid'
model an author-side payment model runs alongside a subscription
model so that authors can choose to make their articles immediately OA
on payment of a fee or publish only to subscribers of the journal for free.
OA publishing (gold OA)
OA publishing is far from theoretical. Publishers are already operating
the model based on subsidies or sponsorship, and there are successful
'author pays' journals and publishers operating in well funded areas like
biomedicine (for example, journals from OA publishers Public Library
of Science and BioMed Central, which is now part of Springer, and
Nucleic Acids Research
published by Oxford University Press), or where
the publisher is able to take advantage of a low labour cost, for example
the Egyptian-based Hindawi Publishing. Survey evidence shows that a
quarter of publishers publish at least one fully OA journal (Cox and
Cox, 2008), and this proportion is rising. Worryingly, though, other
publishers have moved from a subscription publishing model to an
