You have learned about different dimensions of OA journals and OA repositories. In addition to OA journals and OA repositories, other products of scholarly communications have started opening up their resources online for free and equitable access. Many of these resources are also available with CC licenses ensuring freedom of sharing, reusing, redistribution, and remixing. These have specific formats and cater to specific audiences. Some OA repositories provide access to a mixed kind of resources, whereas some gateways or portals are available for dissemination of specific kind of resources. Open Educational Resources (OER) have special role to supplement lifelong learning, continuous education, vocational education and distance learning. Massive Online Courses (MOOCs), Open Textbooks and Open Courseware are also associated with global deployment of OER. Some publishers now have been publishing OA books and OA monographs utilizing author’s pay model, receiving an APC from authors for publishing such books or monographs. OA books and monographs can be searched from the Directory of Open Access Books8 (DOAB). An open source software – the PKP Open Conference Systems9 (OCS) is available from the Public Knowledge Project, helping organizers of scholarly conferences with a free web publishing tool. This software is widely used by the academic institutions, universities and learned societies to create a complete web presence for their conferences. Papers presented in these conferences are freely available in OA mode. Some commercial publishers are also co-publishing OA conference proceedings, in collaborations with scholarly conference organizers. The theses and dissertations are very useful form of scholarly communications, originated from the doctoral, pre-doctoral and post- doctoral research studies undertaken in universities and research institutions. There are certain format-specific OA repositories, which deal with theses and dissertations, also known as ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) repositories. An international organization - the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) promotes the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations. Many of the ETD and OA repositories are indexed in the OAIster10 database and are searchable from its portal. Figure 2.3 shows format specific business models in OA publishing, based on nature of contents of full-text documents getting globally disseminated to scholarly audiences.
In
the first two decades of the 21st century, we see high growth rate of the
number of OA journal titles. DOAJ has recorded about 9297 scholarly OA
journals, whereas OpenDOAR recorded about 2600 OA repositories available across
the world as on March 2014. We also have observed that there is also entry of
predatory OA journals, promising quick publishing avenue to researchers –
obviously with a price of APC paid by the prospective authors. However, there
are various checks and balances to restrict operations of predatory OA
journals, such as strict inclusion criteria at DOAJ and OASPA. Beall List
(ScholarlyOA.com) also provides regular alerts to scholarly communities about
potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers.
Some of them are either not accredited by DOAJ and OASPA, or excluded from
these two self-regulatory bodies. Table 2.2 provides summary of arguments
against OA publishing and their suitable responses. The editorial office of a
peer-reviewed OA journal should be equipped with supportive editorial advisory
board that can scrutinize and peer-review the submitted manuscripts with
academic rigour. Table 2.2 argues that OA and non-OA journals would have
comparable publishing standards, which can drive OA journals’ acceptance,
recognition and reputation if they follow self-regulatory industry standards
and best practices time to time.
|
Table
2.2 Arguments against OA publishing and Suitable Response |
|
|
Arguments Against Open Access |
Responses |
|
OA journals don’t have exhaustive or
in-depth peer reviewing process. |
COPE and OASPA-accredited OA journals follow very exhaustive and in-depth
peer reviewing process, comparable with traditional non-OA scholarly
journals. |
|
Peer reviewing is not satisfactory enough to
validate scientific findings matching existing standards and methodologies. |
Peer reviewing is highly satisfactory in
many journals, particularly which are having high rate of citations or
altmetrics. These journals have comparable academic rigour while accepting
papers. |
|
Academic rigour in OA journals is not
proven. |
Academic rigour is proven when an OA journal
becomes a high ranking journal in a specialized or specific scientific
discipline, or, when the journal receives high rate of citations/ altmetric
score. |
|
PC (article processing charge) is major
hurdle in getting published in OA journals. |
Some studies indicate that only a handful of
OA journals accept APC from prospective authors. Others don’t accept an APC
from the authors. Many of them don’t consider APC as main source of revenue.
On the other hand, toll-access journals charge a print or online subscription
fee – unaffordable to many institutions in the developing as well developed
nations. |
References
and Further Reading
Abadal, E. (2012). Challenges for open access journals: quantity,
quality and economic sustainability. Hipertext.net, 10. Retrieved from http://www.upf.edu/hipertextnet/en/numero-10/challenges-for-open-accessjournals-quantity-quality-and-economic-sustainability.html.
Björk, B-C et al. (2010). Open access to the scientific journal
literature: situation 2009. PLoS ONE, 5(6). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011273
Harnad, S. (2008). The postgutenberg open access journal. In Cope,
B.; Phillips, A (eds.).The future of the academic journal. London: Chandos. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/265617/2/PG-chandos-harnad.pdf
Harnad, S. (2010). The Open Challenge: A Brief History. Public
Service Review: European Science & Technology, 9, 13-15.
Laakso, M., et al. (2011). The development of open access journal
publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE, 6(6). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961
Loy, M. (2011). Hindawi Publishing Corporation: Growing an
Open-Access Contributor-Pays Business Model. Updated 2011. London: Ithaka. http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2009/05/iDF153SCA_Ithaka_CaseStudies_v2_Hindawi_v1-03.pdf
Suber, P. (2009). Ten challenges for open-access journals. SPARC
Open Access Newsletter, 138. Retrieved from http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/
fos/newsletter/10-02-09.htm.
Swan, A. (2006). Repositories overview: policies and implementation.
Open Scholarship 2006: New challenges for Open Access repositories. Retrieved
from http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17498/
Villarroya, A. et al. (2012). Business models of publishers of
scientific journals: Implications for Open Access. El profesional de la
información, 21(2), 129-135.
The Tutorial is customized from UNESCO’s Open
Access (OA) Curriculum modules prepared for academicians and library
professionals for promotion and propagation of open access movement