New Study Compares Open Access and Traditional Publishing
The first large-scale comparison of open-access journals with traditional journals reflects a publishing industry in flux. A new survey indicates that open-access journals — those that make their contents free to all readers upon publication — have widely varying business models. In addition, more than half of all of the journals in the survey, whether open-access or subscription-based, reported that they were likely to change their business model in the next three years.
Some of the findings were not surprising: Compared with traditional journals, open-access journals were by and large newer; they printed fewer features like editorials and news articles; and more of them finished the previous fiscal year in the red. Open-access journals also received fewer submissions and were less selective in choosing among submissions.
But other results were unanticipated. Contrary to expectations, author fees were charged by a larger fraction of traditional journals than open-access journals. More than 80 percent of the traditional journals published by members of the medical-colleges association and hosted by HighWire Press charged fees, such as page charges or color charges. Although the open-access movement is often associated with the author-pays business model used by high-profile publishers like the Public Library of Science, less than half of the open-access journals surveyed charged fees to authors.
Other sources of financial support for open-access journals included advertising, corporate sponsorships, government grants, and the use of volunteers. "Most people think of open access as being synonymous with author pays," said Ms. Kaufman. "The open-access journals don’t rely as much on author fees as one might think."
Read the complete article at: http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i29/29a01802.htm
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 25, 2005
