JISC

Key Perspectives Ltd, June 2005

Report summary

The 350-year-old of model of scholarly publishing on paper in journals, books and monographs has been changed by the arrival of the internet.  This guide is designed to lay out the current routes to scholarly publishing – especially in the context of the ‘digital age’.

More and more journals are being published digitally – many of them digital only. Researchers are also making more and more use of digital secondary resources (such as databases). Those working in the hard sciences still publish in journals, but increasingly tend to use informal methods of electronic communication to give early notice of their results.

Electronic scholarly resources have many uses, but also present concerns:

• There are questions of ownership of electronic material. Some of it is distributed under licence with a fixed lifetime… so libraries don’t get to keep it forever
• No complete answer has been found to the question of how to safely archive electronic material
• Care has to be taken not to confuse preprint with post print electronic articles (that’s to say those that haven’t and those that have been peer reviewed)
• In disciplines like fine art, digital dissemination is not good enough

Scholars need to be able to forge copyright agreements that suit them and avoid handing over all rights to publishers that may prevent future distribution of their work. Several universities are starting to offer advice on this subject.

The report then moves on to briefly explain how Creative Commons licences work. (It’s a licence that can be used for all sorts of content to allow it to be freely distributed and re-used with various restrictions set on attribution, commercial use and copying). They also look at SURF, an organisation set up by the Dutch government to develop “scholarship friendly” copyright practices, before providing links for other relevant groups like the UK Patent Office.

Next they explain the ‘Serials Crisis’ – the problem relating to the large increase in the number of journals available and the large increase in costs which prevents institutions from ever being able to provide their scholars with access to all the journals they want/need.

They point out that old-fashioned print scholarly publishing models are unsustainable and give bad value for money to funders, tax-payers and institutions alike.

They then investigate the alternatives and ways to make digital content freely available such as new digital university presses, BioOne’s attempts to digitise previously print only journals and, of course, Open Access - describing its essence as simply meaning: “that research output is made freely available on the Web from the point of publication, for anyone to read and use, permanently”.

There follows a brief explanation of how Open Access Journals work (especially those that are paid for by contributors rather than subscription) and self-archiving in research repositories. This in turn is followed by a brief overview of International Open Access Initiatives like ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) and INRA (Institut National de Recherche Agronomique) and relevant URLs.

The point out a further advantage of Open Access repositories in that they allow researchers to store and display their research data as well as the finished reports.

Key points

Researchers

“Most publishers permit authors to self-archive the final author version of the manuscript. This is permitted in over 90% of cases.”

“Electronic open access journals can be better for dissemination, particularly across disciplines, and for student access. One article I have published has over 10,000 hits on it.  I consider it unlikely that a print journal would have anything approaching that number of cursory glances.“

Institutions

LISU found that the increase in median journal prices from a range of twelve scholarly journal publishers from 2000 to 2004 varied from 27% (Cambridge University Press) to 94% (Sage). Over the same period the inflation rate has been on average 2.5%. Even learned society journals have outstripped inflation with their price increases: the average increase in price of a society journal in the US over the period between 1988 and 2004 was 7.5%, whereas inflation has averaged 3.1% over the same period.

Read the full report (Word)