SciX: WP 1

WP1 tasks Literature study Current and future web business models and payment systems Formal process model (as is) Repository and e-journal requirements analysis Formal process model (to be) Comparison of the economics of the as-is and to-be models On-line survey (design and implementation) Study of the barriers to process change

WP1 deliverables Scientific publishing: as-is business and information model Technology, market watch, state of the art and information model (with wp 3,4,5) Scientific publishing: to-be business and information model On-line survey software Recommendation, model comparison (all workpackages)

Scientific publishing: to-be business and information model Further developed from the as-is model Contains both the current system and emerging new models in the same model Has been used as a basis for setting up the cost comparison

Some To-be model details

Comparison of costs Web survey of the costs of OA journals Case studies of five publishers Secondary sources

Number of published articles in journals included in the cost comparisons For open access journals –average number of articles = 20 –median = 16 For commercial and non-commercial publishers (both large and small) –the number of articles is considerably higher from 100 to 872 articles

Frequency of publication: Open Access journals

Cost comparison for different business models: cost per article

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Barriers to implementation

What are the main barriers? JournalsSubject repositories Institutional repositories Legal framework-*** IT-infrastructure** Business models****** Institutional behaviour ****** Standards****** Awareness, critical mass ********

Means to overcome the barriers Legal framework New types of copyright agreements allowing parallel OA publishing IT-infrastructure Open source applications such as D-space Business models Author or institutional author charge financed journals Institutional Behaviour More emphasis on availability and readership of publications in Academia Standards Widespread use of the Open Archives Initiative standard Awareness Services such as the DOAJ

Improving the technical infrastructure

Incentives for parallel publishing?!

Raising awareness

Marketing

Integration with indexing services

Main conclusions (basis) literature review formal modelling work and its validation cost studies Interviews and discussions with experts and actors in the field

General conclusions 1 The impact of Open Access channels on the whole flow of scientific publications is still very small On the other hand the emergence of Open Access channels has put mainstream publishers on their toes actively looking at new business models The most common form of OA is in fact authors putting copies of their own publications on their own home pages. This is, however, not an efficient long-term solution The dominating business model for Open Access journals and subject repositories is still the community service model. In the long run this model doesn’t look sustainable

General conclusions 2 The author charge model for OA journals could be a solution, but there are still many open questions The costs per article for OA journals is clearly lower than for mainstream print+electronic journals, but not as radically lower as some proponents of OA have suggested In comparing the costs one also has to remember that there are differences in the level of service provided by the journals, most OA journals don’t have extensive copyediting. Institutional repositories offer in principle many advantages for parallel publishing (archival security, sustainable financing) but the copyright problems need to be resolved.

General conclusions 3 The central lever for change is the point at which the author of a publication decides where to submit it (and also weather to upload a copy to a repository). In Europe there are numerous regional of national journals published in English or European languages, often published on shoestring budgets with public subsidies. These would definitely benefit from going Open Access and would need support with IT-infrastructure, advice etc. OA journals have not been very good at marketing. Solutions such as the Open Access Journal Directory, which has been set up by the Lund university library with the help of SciX data, can be helpful

Conclusions from SciX pilot work 1 It is very important to get a critical mass of initial content The easiest way to achieve this is via partnership arrangements with organisations that have a legacy repository of existing publications In the case of SciX this has been achieved through organisers of a number of recurring conference series These associations have membership fees which include getting the proceedings to such conferences for free or a reduced price. They fear a loss of revenue if access is not restricted to membership.

Conclusions from SciX pilot work 2 There is a one-time cost of digitising and handling of existing material with cannot be funded as a “community service” type activity. The longer term running costs will be much lower though. In the case of OA journals, such as Itcon, there is not this legacy material problem. Here the problem is getting authors to submit their best material for publication Making the products developed available as Open Source solutions is a fruitful extension of the community service ideal, and will help accelerate the developments. Thus SciX solutions have been successfully applied for other domains. Awareness raising is very important, and this has to be done partly on the national level. Librarians, authors, publishers etc. are to a large extent inspired by concrete examples that OA works. The timely dissemination of SciX results has for instance resulted in the founding of the FinnOA committee by the National Library of Finland.

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Table from the deliverable