Tag: journals

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Editors Choice: Open Access 2017: A Year of Stand-Offs, Showdowns, and Funders’ Own Journals

This excerpt by Hilda Bastian originally appeared in the PLOS Blog Absolutely Maybe.

Cartoon about papers being too expensive for most people to read

 

This was the fifth year I tracked events in open access. Sifting through the mass of developments I collected along the way, a couple stood out.

The first is the showdown going on in Germany between the universities and Elsevier. Rolling into 2018 now, the German negotiators aim to hammer out a national access deal that’s sustainable and fair for readers and academic authors – or else pay no subscription at all.

They show no signs of backing down. At year’s end, about 200 academic institutions had cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions.

The second is the emergence of research funder journals/publishing platforms based on the f1000 research model. The Wellcome Trust were the first cab off this rank last year. The goals? More speed, less cost in getting accessible research results out to the world. The model is immediate release with comparatively low author charge, post-publication open peer review, and indexing in PubMed and other bibliographic databases once an article passes enough peer review.[…]

Read the original.

 

 

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Cultural Anthropology, Be My Valentine!

The peer-reviewed journal Cultural Anthropology has gone open access!  When the Directory of Open Access Journals boasts almost 10,000 gold open access journals, why is this big news?  For several reasons:

  • Now that the open access movement is gaining momentum, many journals begin as gold open access journals.  Cultural Anthropology, on the other hand, began as a subscription-based journal…way back in 1986.  It was a well-established and well-respected journal, chugging along just fine, but its editors decided that subscriptions and restrictions were no longer the right model.  So they thoughtfully and carefully transitioned to gold open access.
  • Cultural Anthropology is (to the best of my knowledge) the first really major, established open access anthropology journal in the United States.  The first biggie in any field is big news!
  • Cultural Anthropology is published by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which has been slow to support open access. Organizational movement toward open access in AAA is evidence (among many other pieces of evidence) that open access is no longer a fringe movement.  If it’s in the air at AAA, it’s in the air everywhere.
  • Wait, let’s step back a bit more: Cultural Anthropology is published by a scholarly society! That’s a big deal! As far as I know, no academics are worried about the fate or profits of the big commercial publishers, but many are worried about the financial health of scholarly societies, which often rely on subscription income to support other areas of operation. If SCA and AAA are confident that making Cultural Anthropology open access won’t be ruinous, maybe other associations will begin to think more seriously about embracing openness?  Maybe more scholarly societies will consider Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s statement that a society’s value “may be moving from providing closed access to certain research products to instead facilitating the broadest possible distribution of the work done by its members.”

For all these reasons, I want Cultural Anthropology to be my valentine!

Photo is © Dave, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
Photo is © Dave, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
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OA Landmarks & Bookmarks

Lots of things have been moving recently surrounding open access. Here are just a few bits of news we’re excited about, many of which were brought to our attention and celebrated by our fellow CUNY librarians:

Thanks to our colleagues for emailing and sharing all of this OA news!