Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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One of the leading lights of the open access movement - dedicated to making academic research freely available to everyone over the internet - has joined the ranks of the traditional publishing world. Jan Velterop, publishing director of pioneering open access publisher BioMed Central is joining Germany's Springer, the world's second largest producer of scientific journals, as director of open access, heading up its fledgling open access publishing arm.
The move of such a high profile figure from the open access movement marks an endorsement of Springer's foray into open access and could present a challenge to the market leader in scientific journals, Reed Elsevier.
Open access publishing relies upon the author of a research article paying for it to be published and preserved on the internet so anyone can view it for free. Several traditional publishers, which make their money from journal subscriptions, have experimented with the concept. A year ago Springer decided to augment all its 1,250 journals with "Springer Open Choice". Under this project, any author whose paper is accepted by one of its journals can also publish via open access for a fee of $3,000 (£1,659). Under the Springer model the finished article remains subject to full copyright protection but the author may also post their own version of the article on their personal homepage or institutional website, a process known as author self-archiving. While Reed Elsevier has so far shied from dabbling in open access publishing, it has accepted this alternative version of open access and allows researchers to place articles previously published in its journals on their own websites. Author self-archiving is becoming increasingly prevalent among academics keen to share their findings with as wide an audience as possible.
From The Guardian, 8/17/05 http://tinyurl.com/7e33f
The UIUC has e-access to hundreds of Springer titles. See: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/results.php?interface=87&ByInt=Go
Posted by P. Kaufman at August 17, 2005 12:33 PM
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