There seems to be a little spate this week of new electronic publishing platforms offering routes for gold Open Access. I’ve spotted three just in the last couple of days:
- The Social Sciences Directory, a “monthly-updated, international database of contemporary scholarship relating to the social sciences”. Author fees are a waivable “article processing charge” of £100+VAT per article, or by institutional subscription. Eduserv are asking for expressions of interest from institutions for wrapping up the institutional subscription in a Chest Agreement. Link: www.socialsciencesdirectory.com
- PeerJ, a peer-reviewed academic journal (plus a pre-prints service) focused on the Biological and Medical Sciences. PeerJ promises a “new model” of author fees – instead of a charge for each article submitted, there is a single one-off lifetime “membership plan” of (USD) $99 upwards. (Article in Times Higher Ed.) Link: peerj.com
- Closer to home, Alluvium, a new monthly OA journal of “21st century literary criticism” has been launched by Dr Caroline Edwards of the University of Lincoln, along with Martin Paul Eve (University of Sussex). Link: www.alluvium-journal.org
Hi Paul
I think recent media interest in Open Access coupled with the powerful voice of the publishing industry (who, naturally, are promoting Gold and downplaying, if not undermining, Green) means that all sorts of “entrepreneurs” are perhaps jumping on the OA band-wagon and as, you say, the timing of the REF may also be significant.
There is real concern, as Rachel says on Twitter, that academics are having it reinforced that Gold is the only/best option and that institutions will end up robbing Peter to pay Paul, paying to publish rather than their libraries paying to subscribe.
I realise there are all sorts of issues of economics, inertia and esteem but I would really like to see more institutions implementing OJS – http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs – or similar and publishing their own journals!
Nick
Hi Paul
Thank you very much for passing on the information about Social Sciences Directory to the readers of your blog. I think the scepticism expressed by Nick is understandable and, in some cases, justified. I can only say for my own part that I have worked in subscription publishing and jumped the fence because I became vehemently opposed to it and wished to offer something better. For more on my views, you can read a blogpost I wrote for the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences (http://tinyurl.com/chx327h).
The project came about because I was concerned about the obvious and manifest issues within scholarly publishing. If you were starting from scratch, I thought, how would you do things? I then read a number of articles about some of the open access publishers in STM and it seemed to provide solutions to the problems. However, these benefits have not yet transferred to other disciplines but will do in time, so I thought I could be the one that facilitates that move.
My starting point is unusual, in that I don’t come from either a professional Editing or an Academic background, but have worked in different forms of publishing for nearly two decades and most recently in scholarly publishing for six years. I have always been on the commercial side, and have seen at first hand both the practices of subscription publishers and the impact of austerity measures on library budgets. Whilst I am a huge admirer of the pioneering open access publishers such as PLoS ONE, I do believe that article processing charges costing thousands of dollars, and institutional memberships costing tens of thousands of dollars, are still huge barriers for many academics and departments. Going back to the age old argument that reviewers donate their time for free, but that editorial and production does incur costs, I wondered what would be the minimum price that could be charged, that would cover these costs but not be off putting to potential authors. The figure I decided upon was £100/$150/€120. What will happen next year? Will the prices shoot up? Absolutely not! In fact, my desire is that the growth of Social Sciences Directory will allow APCs to reduce over time and for the company’s status to change.
Social Sciences Directory is intended to appeal to a broad audience, which will include researchers and faculty but also postgraduate students, possibly undergraduate students and practitioners that are either interested in keeping up with current research or have useful additional content to contribute. User behaviour is changing and searching for content by keyword is now normal practice – the results might come from research papers, but there is a wealth of additional material (conference proceedings, company research, dissertations, presentations, news reports etc) that could also be of value. Research in one field could also have an application in areas that are unintended, and the inter-disciplinary nature of a large collection of work will help to cross-fertilise ideas.
We warmly welcome submissions and I am happy to engage and answer any questions.
Kind regards
DAN SCOTT
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