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Home > All Sources > Nature | Reports | Access to scientific literature

Nature / Reports / Access to scientific literature


The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish. New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user. This ongoing web focus will explore current trends and future possibilities. Each week, the website will publish specially commissioned insights and analysis from leading scientists, librarians, publishers and other stakeholders, as well as key links, and articles from our archive. All content is available free.
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Can 'author pays' journals compete with 'reader pays'?
05 04 2008 Publishers of scholarly journals currently obtain most of their revenue from subscription fees charged to libraries and individual users. We call this the 'Reader Pays' pricing model. An alternative pricing method has recently emerged, in which publishers collect their revenue by charging significant publication fees to authors, and then supply their content over the Internet, at no cost to readers. We call this the 'Author Pays' pricing model. 'Open Access, Author Pays' publishing is relatively new and has only become feasible because of the recent development of the Internet; although this has little impact on the fixed costs of producing a journal, it makes the marginal cost of extending Web access to new users almost zero.

The green and the gold roads to Open Access
05 04 2008 The crisis in university journal budgets first brought to light the problem of access to published research. But the problems of affordability and access, although often confused, are distinct. We describe here a practical solution to the access problem.

Can Open Access be viable? The Institute of Physics' experience
05 04 2008 The Institute of Physics (IOP) has considerable experience in Open Access, through its New Journal of Physics (NJP), This Month's Papers, and IOP Select. Launched at the end of 1998, several years before the current Open Access movement, NJP is our highest profile venture in the area. A joint initiative with the German Physical Society, NJP involved several dimensions: to publish an on-line-only journal, of high scientific quality, with rigorous peer review, covering all physics, under a then-innovative business model-free to all readers and with authors of published papers required to pay a publication fee of £300 .

Do Open Access journals have impact?
05 04 2008 At Thomson ISI, we have followed debates over Open Access to scholarly literature with great interest. This is partly because our mission, best incarnated today in the Web of Science®, is to help researchers find and access quality, relevant information wherever it is published. It is also because the journal-level metrics, such as the Impact Factor and Immediacy Index, for which Thomson ISI has become known, have assumed importance in these discussions.

Analysing the scientific literature in its online context
05 04 2008 The free versus fee debate over access to the scientific literature is a lively one, but it is also important to keep in mind the bigger picture, that the Internet is bringing about a much broader evolution in the way scientists work and communicate. Information and value increasingly lies not just in the published article but in relationships between articles, in the links among authors and papers, and in less formal communication among users and communities through Weblogs (or 'blogs'), listservs, home pages and other sources on the Web.

CrossRef launches CrossRef Search, powered By Google
05 04 2008 Imagine searching on Google and being able to restrict results to articles published in peer-reviewed journals. A step in that direction was taken this month when CrossRef, a not-for-profit association of publishers, and nine of its member, launched the CrossRef Search Pilot, powered by Google. From a search box on any one publisher's site, a user can perform a Google search across the content of all nine.

Not so quiet on a Western front
05 04 2008 In negotiations with Reed Elsevier, the University of California libraries recently held out over a license to selected titles in its Science Direct package until a price was agreed that allowed, at least temporarily, the arrest of the spectacular inflation in price over the past few years. This experience has been illuminating to me as a university administrator and a librarian, and informs my thinking on the economics of scholarly publishing set out below.

The primacy of authors in achieving Open Access
05 04 2008 Of all the groups that want OA to scientific and scholarly research literature, only one is in a position to deliver it: authors. It is authors who decide whether to submit their work to OA journals, to deposit their work in OA archives, or to transfer copyright.

PNAS and Open Access
05 04 2008 As I announced in a recent Editorial, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) has begun an Open Access (OA) option, whereby authors may pay a surcharge of US$1,000 to make their paper freely available on the PNAS and PubMed Central (PMC) websites immediately upon publication. The experiment will run until 31 December 2005. The PNAS will then consider ways to make the journal entirely OA, maintain the option in the same or modified form, or discontinue the option.

An evidence-based assessment of the 'author pays' model
05 04 2008 Much discussion of author payments as a means to Open Access lacks consideration of evidence on their potential impact on the scholarly journal system. Our recent work perhaps sheds new light on both favourable and unfavourable aspects of this option.

A professional society's take on access to the scientific literature
05 04 2008 The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), the flagship journal of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), will celebrate its centennial in 2005. The JBC predated the ASBMB by one year. This is notable in that a professional scientific society grew out of the need for a discipline-oriented scientific publication. The expertise represented by a discipline is a very important consideration in the establishment and/or maintenance of the scientific literature.

The best business model for scholarly journals: an economist's perspective
05 04 2008 The answer to the question 'What is the best business model for scholarly journals?' depends on who is asking. In this article, we first characterize the views of some of the major players in the market (for-profit publishers, non-profit publishers, libraries) on which business model is best. We will consider the two commonly discussed business models, the traditional (or 'Reader Pays') model on the one hand and the Open Access (OA) ('Author Pays') model on the other.

Britain decides 'open access' is still an open issue
05 04 2008 Can journals function if authors, instead of readers, carry the cost of publication? An inquiry by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded this week that we will just have to wait and see. After five months of investigating access to journals in science, technology and medicine, the committee has reported that the concept of 'author-pays' open access seems "viable" but requires "further experimentation".

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