Category: Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Communication Web Sites and Weblogs at ARL Libraries (Version 2)

This posting updates and considerably expands my earlier "Scholarly Communication Web Sites at ARL Libraries" posting.

It presents a list of scholarly communication Web sites and Weblogs at the academic member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries. Web sites and Weblogs were identified using separate Google "site:" searches for the exact phrases "scholarly communication" and "open access." Search results were then scanned to identify Web sites or Weblogs that appeared to be intended as the main library’s primary means of communicating to the university community about scholarly communication and/or open access issues. Conferences, presentations, newsletter articles, symposiums, and similar materials were excluded, as were Web sites or Weblogs at branch libraries. Searching was limited to the first few pages of search results.

Additions and corrections are welcome. Use the "Leave a Comment" function for this.

All Sections and Subsections of the Open Access Bibliography Now Linked

There is now a link to each section and subsection of the HTML version of the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals.

For example:

4 Open Access Journals

4.1 General Works
4.2 Economic Issues
4.2.1 General Works
4.2.2 BMJ Rapid Responses about "Author Pays" May Be the New Science Publishing Model
4.3 Open Access Journal Change Agents
4.3.1 SPARC
4.4 Open Access Journal Publishers and Distributors
4.4.1 BioMed Central
4.4.2 Public Library of Science
4.4.3 PubMed Central
4.4.3.1 General Works
4.4.3.2 Science Magazine dEbate on "Building a GenBank of the Published Literature"
4.4.3.3 Science Magazine dEbate on "Is a Government Archive the Best Option?"
4.4.3.4 Science Magazine dEbate on "Just a Minute, Please"
4.4.3.5 Other
4.5 Specific Open Access Journals
4.5.1 Journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals
4.5.2 Pioneering Free E-Journals Not in the DOAJ
4.5.3 Other
4.6 Research Studies

The table of contents in the home page of the bibliography has a complete set of links for all sections and subsections of the document.

The Web page for each major section of the bibliography has links to the subsections (if present) at the start of the page.

HTML Version of the Open Access Bibliography

An HTML version of the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB) is now available.

The HTML version of the book was created from the final draft using a complex set of digital transformations. Consequently, there may be minor variations between it and the print and Acrobat versions, which are the definitive versions of the book.

The OAB provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement’s efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography’s references have such links).

dLIST E-Print Archive Adds Use Statistics

Authors who deposit e-prints in dLIST (Digital Library of Information Science and Technology) can now see use statistics for their works (archive users can see use startistics as well). For example, at the record for the "Indian Digital Library in Engineering Science and Technology (INDEST) Consortium: Consortia-Based Subscription to Electronic Resources for Technical Education System in India: A Government of India Initiative," you would click on "View statistics for this eprint" to get the use statistics for this work. You can view use statistics for the past four weeks, this year, last year, or all years.

Archive-wide use statistics are also available from either an e-print record or the dLIST Statistics page. From either one, you can rank all e-prints by use for the same time periods as individual e-prints and show overall archive use by year/month or country.

Disclosure: I am now the Scholarly Communication subject editor for dLIST.

Version 61, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 61 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,610 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History*
2.2 General Works*
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History*
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals*
3.4 General Works*
3.5 Library Issues*
3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
5.2 License Agreements*
5.3 Other Legal Issues
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
6.2 Digital Libraries*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management*
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author*
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics*

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
Digital Libraries*
Electronic Books and Texts*
Electronic Serials*
General Electronic Publishing*
Images*
Legal*
Preservation*
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
SGML and Related Standards*

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 215 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 570 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

HTML Version of "What Is Open Access?"

An HTML version of my "What Is Open Access?" preprint is now available. This version includes additional links in the body of the document that make it easier to quickly access related information about OA concepts, documents, or systems. While it makes many footnote links available in the body of the document (as well as new ones), it is not an attempt to replicate all footnote links in it.

This paper presents a more nuanced, contemporary view of open access than my "Key Open Access Concepts" excerpt from the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals; however, it had to be very compact to meet the publisher’s needs, and it omits some topics discussed in the earlier document.

Those wanting a more in-depth recent treatment might want to try the first half of my "Open Access and Libraries" preprint, which covers much of this material more fully as a preliminary to discussing the relationship between open access and library functions and operations. However, the "What Is Open Access?" paper reflects some changes in my thinking about OA not found in "Open Access and Libraries."

A PDF version of "What Is Open Access?" is also available, which is more suitable for printing and reading offline.

"What Is Open Access?" will appear in: Jacobs, Neil, ed. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2006. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Open Access Bibliography Author and Title Indexes Are Now Available

Author and title indexes for the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals are now available.

These indexes, which include complete references, were initially generated in EndNote, then refined through a lengthy production process using several text editing programs to produce the final HTML files.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2005 Use Statistics

There were 1,327,703 successful SEPB file requests in 2005, of which 1,034,745 were page requests. 115,029 host computers were served in 160 domains (excluding unknown domains). From October 1996 through December 2005, there have been 5,564,636 successful requests for SEPB files. See the details below.

SEPB Use Statistics

Requests By Year (October 1996-December 2005)

Year Number of File Requests Average Daily File Requests Number of Page Requests Average Daily Page Requests
1996 (October to December) 19,801 281 14,616 207
1997 156,139 428 109,638 300
1998 230,143 630 150,422 412
1999 254,411 697 170,517 467
2000 317,220 867 215,113 588
2001 405,037 1,109 280,547 768
2002 622,311 1,705 393,251 1,077
2003 1,023,619 2,827 634,607 1,752
2004 1,208,252 3,301 796,953 2,177
2005 1,327,703 3,637 1,034,745 2,834

Total File Requests (October 1996-December 2004)

Year Number of File Requests
1996-2005 5,564,636

Number of Host Computers Served (October 1996-December 2005)

Year Distinct Hosts Served
1996
(October to December)		 4,276
1997 29,160
1998 39,145
1999 43,114
2000 51,809
2001 68,391
2002 94,464
2003 117,777
2004 128,218
2005 115,029

"Open Access and Libraries" Preprint

A preprint of my forthcoming book chapter "Open Access and Libraries" is now available.

The preprint takes an in-depth look at the open access movement with special attention to the perceived meaning of the term “open access” within it, the use of Creative Commons Licenses, and real-world access distinctions between different types of open access materials. After a brief consideration of some major general benefits of open access, it examines OA’s benefits for libraries and discusses a number of ways that libraries can potentially support the movement, with a consideration of funding issues.

It will appear in: Jacobs, Mark, ed. Electronic Resources Librarians: The Human Element of the Digital Information Age. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2006.

Postscript: A new preprint is available. I have added more content specific to the impact of OA on electronic resources librarians’ jobs and an appendix on the Creative Commons. Also, I have added another way that OA can save libraries money. I’ve changed the above link to the new preprint; the old one is still available; however, I would recommend reading the new one instead.

Post-PostScript: Having two versions of the preprint available has caused some confusion, so I have taken down the earlier version.

Open Access Bibliography and The Access Principle Discount at Amazon

Amazon is offering the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals and John Willinsky’s insightful The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship together for a discounted price of $68.07 (vs. the normal $79.95). See the OAB Amazon record for the link. (Note: By my request, I do not profit from sales of the print version of the OAB; all proceeds go to ARL to subsidize the print version.)

Version 60, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 60 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,560 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History*
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues*
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History*
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals*
3.4 General Works*
3.5 Library Issues*
3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
5.2 License Agreements*
5.3 Other Legal Issues
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
6.2 Digital Libraries*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
Digital Libraries*
Electronic Books and Texts*
Electronic Serials*
General Electronic Publishing*
Images
Legal*
Preservation*
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
SGML and Related Standards

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 210 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 560 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Selected by Librarians' Index to the Internet

The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography

Update: See the Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 for the latest bibliography.

This bibliography presents selected English-language electronic works about Google Print that are freely available on the Internet. It has a special focus on the legal issues associated with this project. Page numbers for print/electronic publications are not included unless they are mentioned in the electronic version.

Association of American Publishers. "Google Library Project Raises Serious Questions for Publishers and Authors."

Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. "Google Print for Libraries—ALPSP Position Statement."

Authors Guild. "Authors Guild Sues Google, Citing 'Massive Copyright Infringement'."

Band. Jonathan. "The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis." ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 242 (2005): 6-9.

Banks, Marcus A. "The Excitement of Google Scholar, the Worry of Google Print." Biomedical Digital Libraries 2 (Article 2 2005).

Battelle, John. "The AAP/Google Lawsuit: Much More At Stake ." John Battelle's Searchblog, 20 October 2005.

Blankenhorn, Dana. "Economic Lesson of Google Print." Moore's Lore, 21 October 2005.

Chafkin, Max. "Google Scrambles to Defend 'Google Print for Libraries' Initiative." The Book Standard, 21 October 2005.

Coleman, Mary Sue. "Riches We Must Share . . ." The Washington Post, 22 October 2005, A21.

Crawford, Susan. "Why Google Is Right." Susan Crawford Blog, 21 September 2005.

Drummond, David. "Why We Believe in Google Print." Google Blog, 19 October 2005.

DW staff. "German Publishers Warm to Google Library." Deutsche Welle, 20 October 2005.

Felten, Edward W. "Google Print, Damages and Incentives." Freedom to Tinker, 23 September 2005.

Finkelstein, Seth. "Google Print Is Not Copyright's Enemy-Of-My-Enemy-Is-My-Friend." Infothought, 23 September 2005.

Google. "Google Checks Out Library Books."

———. "Google Print."

———. "Information for Publishers about the Library Project."

Google, and University Library, University of Michigan. "Cooperative Agreement."

Graham, Jefferson. "Google Print Project Inspires Fans, Fears." USA Today, 17 October 2005.

Helm, Burt. "For Google, Another Stormy Chapter." BusinessWeek, 22 September 2005.

———. "A Google Project Pains Publishers." BusinessWeek, 23 May 2005.

———. "Google's Escalating Book Battle." BusinessWeek, 20 October 2005.

———. "Google's Plan Doesn't Scan." BusinessWeek, 12 August 2005.

———. "A New Page in Google's Books Fight." BusinessWeek, 22 June 2005.

Hof, Rob. "Lawsuit Against Google Print: The End of the Internet?" The Tech Beat, 21 October 2005.

Keegan, Victor. "A Bookworm's Delight." The Guardian, 21 October 2005.

Lavoie, Brian, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Lorcan Dempsey. "Anatomy of Aggregate Collections: The Example of Google Print for Libraries." D-Lib Magazine 11, no. 9 (2005).

Lessig, Lawrence. "Google Sued." Lessig Blog, 22 September 2005.

Marco, Meghann. "So, My Publisher Is Sueing Google. . ." MeghannMarco.com, 19 October 2005.

Markoff, John, and Edward Wyatt. "Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database." The New York Times, 14 December 2004.

Mathes, Adam. "The Point of Google Print." Google Blog, 19 October 2005.

O'Reilly, Tim. "Google Library vs. Publishers." O'Reilly Radar, 13 August 2005.

Patry, William. "Google Revisited." The Patry Copyright Blog, 23 September 2005.

______. "Google, the Second Suit and Second Copy." The Patry Copyright Blog, 21 October 2005.

Petit, C. E. "Author's Guild v. Google: A Skeptical Analysis." Scrivener's Error: Warped Weft, 2005.

Pickering, Bobby. "Google Clarifies Print Differences in Europe." Information World Review, 18 October 2005.

Quilter, Laura. "Google & Not-for-Profit Libraries." Derivative Work, 13 August 2005.

Quint, Barbara. "CORRECTIONS: Google Print Not All I Said It Was." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 29 August 2005.

———. "Google and Research Libraries Launch Massive Digitization Project." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 20 December 2004.

———. "Google Library Project Hit by Copyright Challenge from University Presses." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 31 May 2005.

———. "Google Slows Library Project to Accommodate Publishers." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 15 August 2005.

———. "Google's Library Project: Questions, Questions, Questions." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 27 December 2004.

———. "The Other Shoe Drops: Google Print Sued for Copyright Violation." Information Today NewsBreaks & the Weekly News Digest, 3 October 2005.

Raff, Andrew. "Google, Publishers, Copies and 'Being Evil'." IPTAblog, 21 September 2005.

Slater, Derek. "Google Print Commentary Round-Up." A Copyfighter's Musings, 20 October 2005.

Smith, Adam M. "Making Books Easier to Find." Google Blog, 11 August 2005.

Suber, Peter. "Does Google Library Violate Copyright?" SPARC Open Access Newsletter, no. 90 (2005).

Sullivan, Danny. "Forget Google Print Copyright Infringement; Search Engines Already Infringe." Search Engine Watch, 25 May 2005.

_______. "Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn't Reprint." Search Engine Watch, 21 October 2005.

Taylor, Nick. ". . . But Not at Writers' Expense." The Washington Post, 22 October 2005, A21.

Thompson, Bill. "Defending Google's Licence to Print." BBC News, 10 October 2005.

University Library, University of Michigan. "UM Library/Google Digitization Partnership FAQ, August 2005."

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "Google Avoids Copyright Meltdown." SIVACRACY.NET: Opinions, Rants, and Obsessions of Siva Vaidhyanathan and his Friends and Family, 12 August 2005.

_______. "On the Essense of Libraries and Fair Use." SIVACRACY.NET: Opinions, Rants, and Obsessions of Siva Vaidhyanathan and his Friends and Family, 18 August 2005.

_______. "'Steal This Book'." On the Media, 30 September 2005.

"Why I Think Google's Library Plan was Out of Bounds." SIVACRACY.NET: Opinions, Rants, and Obsessions of Siva Vaidhyanathan and his Friends and Family, 13 August 2005.

von Lohmann, Fred. "Authors Guild Sues Google." Deep Links, 20 September 2005.

Wentworth, Donna. "Google Print Is as Google Print Does." Copyfight, 15 August 2005.

Wilkin, John P., and Reginald Carr. "Google's Library Digitization Project: Reports from Michigan and Oxford."

Wojcicki, Susan. "Google Print and the Authors Guild." Google Blog, 20 September 2005.

Wu,Tim. "Leggo My Ego." Slate, 17 October 2005.

Wyatt, Edward. "Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe, Widening Its Book Search Effort." The New York Times, 18 October 2005.

Selected by Librarians' Index to the Internet

Version 59, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 59 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,480 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works*
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History*
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works*
3.5 Library Issues*
3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
5.2 License Agreements*
5.3 Other Legal Issues
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
6.2 Digital Libraries*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies*
Appendix B. About the Author*
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
Digital Libraries*
Electronic Books and Texts*
Electronic Serials*
General Electronic Publishing*
Images
Legal*
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
SGML and Related Standards

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 200 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 550 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Selected by Librarians' Index to the Internet

Searchable Version of the Open Access Webliography

Jim Pitman, Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, has created a derivative work from the Open Access Webliography, which is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

This version of the OAW utilizes the BibServer software, and it is searchable. There are four views of the entries:

  • Bookmark: A link to the resource.
  • Plain text: A field-oriented ASCII presentation of the resource with active links in the description field.
  • Linked text: A field-oriented HTML presentation of the resource with complete active links.
  • Descriptions: The resource name and description with active links.

Entries are can be sorted by category, description, title, and URL.

Thanks, Jim.

The Role of Reference Librarians in Institutional Repositories

Reference Services Review 33, no. 3 (2005) is a special issue on "the role of the reference librarian in the development, management, dissemination, and sustainability of institutional repositories (IRs)." It includes the following articles (the links are to e-prints):

Open Access Webliography

A preprint of the article "Open Access Webliography" by Adrian K. Ho and Charles W. Bailey, Jr. is now available. This annotated webliography presents a wide range of electronic resources related to the open access movement that were freely available on the Internet as of April 2005.

This article appears in the volume 33, no. 3 (2005) issue of "Reference Services Review," which is a special issue about "the role of the reference librarian in the development, management, dissemination, and sustainability of institutional repositories."

A preprint of my "The Role of Reference Librarians in Institutional Repositories" article in this issue is also available.

Both preprints are under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Below is a list of the topics covered in the webliography:

  • Starting Points
  • Bibliographies
  • Debates
  • Directories—E-Prints, Institutional Repositories, and
    Technical Reports
  • Directories—Open Access and Free Journals
  • Directories and Guides—Copyright and Licensing
  • Directories and Guide—Open Access Publishing
  • Directories and Guides—Software
  • Disciplinary Archives
  • E-Serials about Open Access
  • Free E-Serials That Frequently Publish Open Access
    Articles
  • General Information
  • Mailing Lists
  • Organizations
  • Projects
  • Publishers and Distributors
  • Search Engines
  • Special Programs for Developing Countries
  • Statements
  • Weblogs

The Economics of Free, Scholar-Produced E-Journals

While highly visible, large-scale STM open access publishing ventures such as BioMed Central loom large in the free e-journal scene, small-scale scholar-produced e-journals continue to quietly publish new scholarly articles as they have done for at least 18 years now.

I won’t detour into a lengthy history lesson for those readers who weren’t there. The short version of the story is that New Horizons in Adult Education is typically seen as the first scholarly e-journal published on the Internet (it was established in Fall 1987); however, it’s important to recognize that those were primitive times Internet-wise, when distribution of ASCII article files via list servers and FTP servers were cutting-edge ventures. So, as you would image, finding tools were informal and few and far between. ARL’s publication of the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists in July 1991 was a landmark event that made the invisible visible.

For some reason, there was a mini-surge of activity in the 1989-1991 period, with the emergence of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, EJournal, Electronic Journal of Communication, Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research, Postmodern Culture, Psycoloquy, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Surfaces, and other journals. Several editors (myself, Stevan Harnad, and John Unsworth) rocked the house at the Association of Research Libraries’ 1992 Symposium on Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks to the dismay of the assembled conventional publishers, who thought we were mad as hatters because we thought that: (a) e-journals were viable, (b) we could anoint ourselves as publishers, and (c) we were giving it away for free. My recollection is that, after the last speech, there was a stunned silence followed by a spattering of applause and a frenzy of generally hostile, astonished questions.

And, as they say, the rest is history. Peter Suber’s Timeline of the Open Access Movement is a good way to get a handle on subsequent events. Someday, I’ll write more about the early e-volution of e-journals.

So, onto the topic at hand. What are the economics of free, scholar-produced e-journals?

Let’s delimit the field a bit. We are not talking about journals produced by university presses or professional associations. Scholar-produced e-journals are generally labors of love, supported by a small group of scholars who serve without pay as editors, editorial board members, and journal production staff.

They often leverage existing technical infrastructure (e.g., Web servers) at the editors’ institutions. The volume of published papers is typically fairly modest, and the papers themselves are frequently not graphically complex. Editors or other volunteers manage the peer review process (usually via electronic means) as well as copy edit and format articles. HTML and PDF are the usual distribution formats, requiring HTML editors, Word, Acrobat, or similar low-cost or free programs. Increasingly, electronic journal management systems are used to automate editorial functions and simplify journal site creation and maintenance (a prime example is the free Open Journal Systems software). "Marketing" is often done by free electronic means: journal mailing lists, table of contents messages sent to targeted subject-related mailing lists, RSS alerts, etc. Since the content is free and electronic, there is no overhead for subscription/licensing management. Since no one gets paid, human resources functions are not needed. If authors retain copyright or content is under a Creative Commons or similar license, no permissions support is needed. Since existing facilities are used (at work or at home), there is no need to rent or purchase office space. Since no money is changing hands in any form, accounting support is unnecessary.

So, what are the economics of free, scholar produced journals? The glib answer is that there are none. But, the real answer is that the costs are so low and the functions so integral to scholarship that they are easily absorbed into ongoing operational costs of universities. Even if they weren’t and scholars had to do it all on their own, server hosting solutions are so ubiquitous and cheap, free open source software is so functional and pervasive, and commercial PC software is so powerful and cheap (especially at academic discounts) that these minor costs would act as no real barrier to the production of scholar-produced e-journals.

Of course, this is not to say that there are not issues associated with the viability and sustainability of these journals, the perpetual preservation of their contents, and other difficulties, but these are topics for another day.

One-Page Open Access Resources Handout

Need a very short (one-page) handout that identifies a few key open access resources? My OA co-presenter (Sara Ranger) and I did, so we created one. It’s at:

http://www.escholarlypub.com/cwb/OAHandout.pdf

It’s available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Obviously, a number of very valuable resources had to be omitted, but, hopefully, users can employ these core resources to discover them.

BMC’s Impact Factors: Elsevier’s Take and Reactions to It

A growing body of research suggests that open access may increase the impact of scholarly literature (see Steve Hitchcock’s "Effect of Open Access and Downloads ("Hits") on Citation Impact: A Bibliography of Studies"). Consequently, "impact factors" play an important part in the ongoing dialog about the desirability of the open access model.

On June 23, 2005, BioMed Central issued a press release entitled "Open Access Journals Get Impressive Impact Factors" that discussed the impact factors for their journals. You can consult the press release for the details, but the essence of it was expressed in this quote from Matthew Cockerill, Director of Operations at BioMed Central:

These latest impact factors show that BioMed Central’s Open Access journals have joined the mainstream of science publishing, and can compete with traditional journals on their own terms. The impact factors also demonstrate one of the key benefits that Open Access offers authors: high visibility and, as a result, a high rate of citation.

On July 8, 2005, Tony McSean, Director of Library Relations for Elsevier, sent an e-mail message to SPARC-OAForum@arl.org "(OA and Impressive Impact Factors—Non Propter Hoc") that presented Elsevier’s analysis of the BMC data, putting it "into context with those of the major subscription-based publishers." Again, I would encourage you to read this analysis. The gist of the argument is as follows:

This comparison with four major STM publishers demonstrates that BMC’s overall IF results are unremarkable, and that they certainly do not provide evidence to support the common assertion that the open access publishing model increases impact factor scores.

My reaction was as follows.

These interesting observations do not appear to account for one difference between BMC journals and the journals of other publishers: their age. Well-established, older journals are more likely to have attained the credibility required for high IFs than newer ones (if they ever will attain such credibility).

Moreover, there is another difference: BMC journals are primarily e-journals, not print journals with derivative electronic counterparts. Although true e-journals have gained significant ground, I suspect that they still start out with a steeper hill to climb credibility-wise than traditional print journals.

Third, since it involves paying a fee, the author-pays model requires a higher motivation on the part of the author to publish in such journals, likely leading to a smaller pool of potential authors. To obtain high journal IFs, these had better be good authors. And, for good authors to publish in such journals, they must hold them in high regard because they have other alternatives.

So, if this analysis is correct, for BMC journals to have attained "unremarkable" IFs is a notable accomplishment because they have attained parity with conventional journals that have some significant advantages.

Earlier in the day, Dr. David Goodman, Associate Professor of the Palmer School of Library and Information Science, commented (unbeknownst to me since I read the list in digest form):

1/ I doubt anyone is contending that at this point any of the
BMC titles are better than the best titles from other publishers. The point is that they are at least as good as the average, and the best of them well above average. For a new publisher, that is a major accomplishment—and one that initially seemed rather doubtful. . . .

2/ Normally, publishing in a relative obscure and newly founded journal would come at some disadvantage to the author, regardless of how the journal was financed. . . .

3/ You can’t judge OA advantage from IF alone. IF refers to journals, OA advantage refers to individual articles. The most convincing studies on OA advantage are those with paired comparisons of articles, as Stevan Harnad has explained in detail.

4/ Most of the BMC titles, the ones beginning with the BMC journal of…, are OA completely. For the ones with Toll Access reviews etc., there is obviously much less availability of those portions than the OA primary research, so I doubt the usual review journal effect applies to the same extent as usual.

On July 9, 2005, Matt Cockerill sent a rebuttal to the SPARC-OAForum that said in part:

Firstly, the statistics you give are based on the set of journals that have ISI impact factors (in fact, they cover only journals which had 2003 Impact Factors). . . . Many of BioMed Central’s best journals are not yet tracked by ISI.

Secondly, comparing the percentage of Impact Factors going up or down does not seem a particularly meaningful metric. What is important, surely, is the actual value of the Impact Factor (relative to others in the field). In that regard, BioMed Central titles have done extremely well, and several are close to the top of their disciplines. . . .

Thirdly, you raise the point that review articles can boost a journal’s Impact Factor, and that many journals publish review articles specifically with the intention of improving their Impact Factor. This is certainly true, but of BioMed Central’s 130+ journals, all but six are online research journals, and publish virtually no review articles whatsoever. . . .

No reply yet from Elsevier, but, whether there is or not, I’m sure that we have not heard the last of the "impact factor" argument.

Stevan Harnad has made it clear that what he calls the "journal-affordability problem" is not the focus of open access (this is perhaps best expressed in Harnad et al.’s "The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access"). The real issue is the "research article access/impact problem":

Merely to do the research and then put your findings in a desk drawer is no better than not doing the research at all. Researchers must submit their research to peer review and then "publish or perish," so others can use and apply their findings. But getting findings peer-reviewed and published is not enough either. Other researchers must find the findings useful, as proved by their actually using and citing them. And to be able to use and cite them, they must first be able to access them. That is the research article access/impact problem.

To see that the journal-affordability problem and the article access/impact problem are not the same one need only note that even if all 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals were sold to universities at cost (i.e., with not a penny of profit) it would still be true that almost no university has anywhere near enough money to afford all or even most of the 24,000 journals, even at minimal access-tolls (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setuprank). Hence, it would remain true even then that not all would-be users could access all of the yearly 2.5 million articles, and hence that that potential research impact would continue to be lost.

So although the two problems are connected (lower journal prices would indeed generate somewhat more access), solving the journal-affordability problem does not solve the research access/impact problem.

Of course, there are different views of open access, but, for the moment, let’s say that this view is the prevailing one and that this is the most compelling argument to win the hearts and minds of scholars for open access. Open access will rise or fall based on its demonstrated ability to significantly boost impact factors, and the battle to prove or disprove this effect will be fierce indeed.

Key Open Access Concepts

An excerpt from the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB) that provides a brief overview of OA concepts is now available in HTML-tagged format. Additional links have been added, and old links checked and updated. As part of the OAB, it is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/keyoaconcepts.htm

Version 58, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 58 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
is now available. This selective bibliography presents over
2,420 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources
that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing
efforts on the Internet.

http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html

http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.pdf

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly
Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the
same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the
open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary
archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access
journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than
SEPB does.

http://www.arl.org/pubscat/pubs/openaccess/

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are
marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

1 Economic Issues*
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History*
2.2 General Works*
2.3 Library Issues*
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History*
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues*
3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
5.2 License Agreements
5.3 Other Legal Issues
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
6.2 Digital Libraries*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management*
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author*

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes
the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries*
Electronic Books and Texts*
Electronic Serials*
General Electronic Publishing*
Images*
Legal*
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
SGML and Related Standards

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each
major section is a separate file. There are links to sources
that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be
searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in
the Acrobat file:

(1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of
new resources; also available by mailing list—see second
URL)

http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepwlist.htm

(2) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of
over 270 related Web sites)

http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepr.htm

(3) Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/archive/sepa.htm

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed
bibliography is about 200 pages long. The Acrobat file is
over 470 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published
in The Journal of Electronic Publishing:

http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/bailey.html

The Journal of Electronic Publishing Is Reborn

Good news! The Journal of Electronic Publishing is coming back after a long hiatus (the last issue was published in August 2002). New issues will be announced on PACS-P and other lists. See the press release below for details.

Contact: Maria S. Bonn Director, Scholarly Publishing Office, 734-763-3343, mbonn@umich.edu

Journal of Electronic Publishing Re-Launched by Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office

Ann Arbor, May 31, 2005—The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan University Library will re-launch The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) in January, 2006.

"JEP is an excellent fit for us in several ways," says Maria Bonn, Director of the Scholarly Publishing Office. "It is another outstanding journal that we can make available free over the Internet, it fits with our commitment to library-based scholarly publishing, and it covers the very area we are involved in, electronic publishing." Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office currently publishes 10 journals and four scholarly monograph series online.

JEP was started by the University of Michigan Press in 1995. In 2003 the press agreed to transfer the journal to the Columbia University Press, but the transfer was never completed and the journal—still at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/—has had no new issues since then.

"Since its first issue, JEP has been a source of innovative ideas, best practices, and leading-edge thinking about all aspects of publishing, authorship, and readership in the electronic environment," says Mark Sandler, Collection Development Officer for the University of Michigan University Library. Returning after a three-year hiatus, JEP will "continue to document the changes in publishing with the growth of the Internet, and to stimulate and shape the direction of those changes."

The Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO; http://spo.umdl.umich.edu) was founded in 2001 to support academic publishing through a library-based publishing platform. SPO is also teaming with SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; http://www.arl.org/sparc/index.html) on the recently announced Publisher Assistance Program to provide business planning and digital publishing services to facilitate open-access publishing in the social sciences and humanities. Those services will be available to JEP as well, ensuring its future and keeping it at its original University of Michigan home.

SPO’s first issue of JEP will be in January, 2006. "JEP burst on the scene with a focus on experimentation, vision, and prediction," Sandler said. He said that now, ten years later, electronic publishing practices have stabilized for some formats and markets (for instance, scholarly journals have shown significant convergence of distribution and pricing models), but that many unresolved issues remain for newspapers, trade books, magazines, and newer forms of publishing like blogs and wikis. "All aspects of electronic publishing still face considerable change and sometimes upheaval, and a great deal of the creative turmoil that JEP captured in the mid-nineties still challenges publishers, authors, librarians, and readers. We still struggle to understand author and reader preferences, and still search for stable economic models that will allow publishing to flourish in an age of electronic communication," he said. "The new JEP will continue to look back over the past 20 or 30 years to see how we’ve come to this point in the history of publishing, and look forward to where publishing may be heading. It will look inward at key players and practices of publishing, and also look outward at movements on the margins that are challenging traditional publishing interests, and at readers worldwide affected by the interplay of technological and economic forces that have revolutionized social communication."

JEP‘s editor, Judith Axler Turner, will remain at the helm, with editorial input and publishing support from Mark Sandler and Maria Bonn. A new editorial board will be constituted, and JEP will solicit articles that present wide-ranging and diverse viewpoints on contemporary publishing practices, and encourage dialogue and understanding between key decision-makers in publishing and those who are affected by the decisions being made.

The first new issue will focus on the changes in electronic publishing in the past three years, exploring topics such as the rise of open access publishing, the increasingly complicated intellectual property landscape, the rise of new communication technologies, and the new economics of scholarly publishing. JEP is actively seeking feedback on its new direction and is also looking for high-quality submissions on these topics. Authors and others are invited to discuss JEP‘s future or submit articles by contacting the editorial team at JEP-info@umich.edu. Back issues of JEP may currently be found at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/

Google Print Controversy Heats Up

Lots of ink (real and virtual) on Google Print and the AAUP’s recent resistance (all from Open Access News):

"Forget Google Print Copyright Infringement; Search Engines Already Infringe," SearchEngineWatch

"From Gutenberg to Google: Five Views on the Search-Engine Company’s Project to Digitize Library Books," The Chronicle
of Higher Education (requires subscription)

"Google Books under Fire," The Register

"Google Library Project Hit by Copyright Challenge from University Presses," Information Today Newsbreaks

"Google Print Goes Live," InternetNews

"A Google Project Pains Publishers," Business Week

"Google This: ‘Copyright Law,’" Business Week

"Google’s Scan Plan Hits More Bumps," Forbes

"Publishers Lay into Google Print," ZDNet UK

"The University Press Assn.’s Objections," Business Week

"University-Press Group Raises Questions About Google’s Library-Scanning Project," The Chronicle of Higher Education

Is the Access Spectrum a Red Herring or Are Green and Gold Too Black and White?

Stevan Harnad has commented extensively on my "The Spectrum of E-Journal Access Policies: Open to Restricted Access" DigitalKoans posting. Thanks for doing so, Stevan. Here are my thoughts on your comments.

First, let me concede that if you look at this question from Stevan’s particular open-access-centric point of view that, of course, the spectrum of publisher access policies is a complete and utter waste of time. I don’t recall suggesting that this was a new open access model per se, even though it includes open access in it as a component and it makes some further distinctions between open access and free access journals. Rather, it is what it says it is: a model that presents a range of publisher access policies from the least restrictive to the most restrictive. The color codes merely enhance the model slightly, they are not central to it (and, of course, as Steven says, he created this color coding Frankenstein to begin with). The model says nothing about e-prints.

That said, Steven’s view that open access equals free access (period) is not, as he well knows, universal, and his green and gold models are based on this premise.

Here is how Peter Suber defines OA in "Open Access Overview: Focusing on Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Articles and Their Preprints" (boldface is mine):

  • OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and OA should apply to the full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries.
  • OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions).
  • There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough.
  • Here’s how the Budapest Open Access Initiative put it: "There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
  • Here’s how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: "For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users ‘copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship….’"
  • The Budapest (February 2002), Bethesda (June 2003), and Berlin (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I call refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the BBB definition.

So, by most OA definitions, a journal that "makes all of its articles immediately and permanently accessible to all would-be users webwide toll-free" is not OA unless it also uses a Creative Commons or similar license that permits use with minimal restrictions. It is FA (Free Access). As I have said in an earlier dialog, we can count on no journal to be "permanently accessible" unless some trusted archive other than the publisher makes it so, an issue that Steven apparently disagrees with, believing that publishers never go out of business.

I note that Steven has deviated from his "chrononomic parsimony" principle by having both "Green" and "Pale-Green," in his model and then lumping them both together in his discussions as "GREEN." (In his Summary Statistics So Far site he also introduces the color Grey, for "neither yet.") If preprints and postprints are of equal value, why not just code them Green? If they are not of equal value (i.e., postprints that accurately incorporate the changes that occur during the peer-review process are the only real substitute for the published article), then, in reality, those 15.5% of "Pale-Green" journals are of limited value in terms of self-archiving, and the real GREEN journal number is 76.2%, not 92%.

I must admit to some confusion on his latest stand that all types of self-archiving are equal. In "Ten Years After," he seems to be expressing a different sentiment regarding author home pages:

That said, there was a naive element to the Subversive Proposal, too, since Harnad’s plan would have led to researchers posting their papers on thousands of isolated FTP sites. This would have meant that anyone wanting to access the papers would have needed prior knowledge of the papers’ existence and the whereabouts of every relevant archive. They would then have had to search each archive separately. Today, Harnad concedes that "anonymous FTP sites and arbitrary Web sites are more like common graves, insofar as searching is concerned."

Perhaps I misunderstand what is meant by "arbitrary Web sites."

As the prior DigitalKoans dialog beginning with "How Green Is My Publisher?" shows, we clearly disagree on many points related to the importance of author copyright agreements (e.g., they have to permit deposit in disciplinary archives), the importance of deposit in OAI-PMH-compliant archives, and the mission and scope of institutional repositories.

A series of DigitalKoans postings that start with "The View from the IR Trenches, Part 1" provides numerous quotes from the literature that bolster my case.

Second, while I admire Stevan’s unflagging advocacy of open access (by which he really means free access), open access is not the only issue in the e-journal publishing world that is of concern to librarians to whom this missive was mainly addressed. This is because librarians, while hopefully working to build a better future, have to deal with the messy existing realities of the e-publishing environment to do their jobs and to make decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. Consequently, librarians have to scan the e-publishing environment, analyze it, categorize it, and make evaluative judgements about it. They have to make models of e-publishing reality to better understand it. They don’t have the luxury of only dreaming about what that reality should be.

Thus, while Steven is indifferent to many of those 894,302 free full-text articles from 857 HighWire-hosted journals (a number which likely dwarfs all articles available from OA/free journals), librarians are not. Paying attention to them is important. While many are not immediately free, they are free nonetheless after some embargo period. And EA (Embargoed Access) journals are better than RA (Restricted Access) journals in practical terms for users who have no other current access. And even limited access to more restrictive PA (Partial Access) journals is likely to be welcomed by users who today would have no access otherwise. I know that both kinds of access are welcomed by me as a user.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t strive for journals to move up the spectrum from red to green, but it is to say that: (1) some free access is better than no free access for journals that will never move further up the spectrum, and (2) it may be that some journals have to move step-by-step, not in one leap, for the change to take place, and, if they start higher, it may be easier to encourage them to move further and faster. (But we have to know which ones have this potential based on their current status.)

Steven’s model has colors, but, in reality, each color is black and white: Gold and nothing, GREEN and grey. All or nothing. And, as long as you accept his premises, it works, and it allows him to focus on his free-access goal with single minded determination, undistracted by the knotted complexities of the e-scholarly publishing environment. Long may he run.

For those who have a different view of OA or who have broader concerns, it’s too "black and white."

I give him the last word on this matter.

The Spectrum of E-Journal Access Policies: Open to Restricted Access

As journal publishing continues to evolve, the access policies of publishers become more differentiated. The open access movement has been an important catalyst for change in this regard, prodding publishers to reexamine their access policies and, in some cases, to move towards new access models.

To fully understand where things stand with journal access policies, we need to clarify and name the policies in use. While the below list may not be comprehensive, it attempts to provide a first-cut model for key journal access policies, adopting the now popular use of colors as a second form of shorthand for identifying the policy types.

  1. Open Access journals (OA journals, color code: green): These journals provide free access to all articles and utilize a form of licensing that puts minimal restrictions on the use of articles, such as the Creative Commons Attribution License. Example: Biomedical Digital Libraries.
  2. Free Access journals (FA journals, color code: cyan): These journals provide free access to all articles and utilize a variety of copyright statements (e.g., the journal copyright statement may grant liberal educational copying provisions), but they do not use a Creative Commons Attribution License or similar license. Example: The Public-Access Computer Systems Review.
  3. Embargoed Access journals (EA journals, color code: yellow): These journals provide free access to all articles after a specified embargo period and typically utilize conventional copyright statements. Example: Learned Publishing.
  4. Partial Access journals (PA journals, color code: orange): These journals provide free access to selected articles and typically utilize conventional copyright statements. Example: College & Research Libraries.
  5. Restricted Access journals (RA journals, color code: red): These journals provide no free access to articles and typically utilize conventional copyright statements. Example: Library Administration and Management. (Available in electronic form from Library Literature & Information Science Full Text and other databases.)

Using this taxonomy, an examination of the contents of the Directory of Open Access Journals quickly reveals that, in reality, it is the Directory of Open and Free Access Journals, because many listed journals do not use a Creative Commons Attribution License or similar license.

Some may argue that the distinction between OA and FA journals is meaningless; however, to do so suggests that the below sections of the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" in italics are meaningless and, consequently, that the Open Access movement is really just the Free Access movement.

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Not that there would be anything wrong with the Free Access movement, but some may feel that the broader scope of the Open Access movement is much more desirable.

In any case, the journal universe is not just green or red, and it’s a pity that we don’t know the breakdown of the spectrum (e.g., x number of green journals and y number of cyan journals), for that would give us a better handle on how the world has changed from the days when all journals were red journals.