Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol. 55, No. 402, pp. iii, July 2004
Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol. 55, No. 402, © Society for Experimental Biology 2004; all rights reserved
Preface |
Preface
From July 2004 authors of research papers published in the JXB will have the option to pay a small fee ($400) in return for making their paper immediately freely available online. If authors choose not to pay then their paper will remain under the usual subscription control. This Open Access experiment arises from a commitment to maximize exposure and extend availability, but why is such a radical approach necessary?
Peer review and journal publication involve considerable costs, the full cost of publishing a paper in the JXB is around $2000 and considerably more in many similar journals. These costs are currently met by subscription charges, however, recent developments in technology and economic change make the current business model both undesirable and unsustainable.
Accessibility to the complete scientific literature is gradually assuming more importance as search techniques expand our horizons. Science itself is becoming more integrated as findings assume cross-discipline relevance. The publication of large data sets is now possible and as meta-data protocols develop it is not difficult to envisage the end of specific databases and the creation of a science base navigated by sophisticated searching and sorting tools. In such a world, subscription barriers would be inhibiting.
Limited library budgets, increasing publication and subscription costs, and the introduction of the Big Deals in which libraries subscribe to large collections of journals all result in small, independent, often society-owned journals being squeezed out. If this situation continues a limited number of large journals will develop editorial monopolies potentially dictating the direction of research.
A freely-available scientific literature would bring many additional benefits. It is a step towards an inclusive global community. Students from high school to PhD would be guaranteed access to all that they were interested in and the free availability of information would lend confidence to an ever more suspicious general public.
Many small journals like the JXB are owned by learned societies that use profits to support very worthwhile work. In author-pays business models profits will be limited and may even dry up, so what is the future for the societies? Well it is up to them! If financial pressure forces a re-think of what societies can offer their members and how they can support their activities by using the skills of those members then all the better. This is how the tradition of scientific publishing began and in a world changing as rapidly as ours there can be no shortage of opportunity.
If you are interested in the detail of our experiment then please visit http://www3.oup.co.uk/exbotj/open_access.html/. We are interested to hear your views so please send all responses to j.exp.bot{at}lancaster.ac.uk
Finally, we hope you will support our endeavour by sending your papers to the JXB.
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