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RSS feedsFunding for publishers willing to trial open access (OA) publishing has allayed concerns about the OA business model, according to JISC. Its three-year project to fund and endorse publishers introducing the OA model has acted as a catalyst to publishers’development of open access, according to a report by Key Perspectives .
In addition to offering financial support to publishers as they developed their OA model, JISC paid some or all of the authors’ fees that would normally have been charged by the publishers. Of the authors participating, 23% said this allowed them to publish in journals they would not have otherwise published in.
The initiative is one of a number run by JISC to support open access in both its forms: publisher open access and institutional repositories.
JISC has come in for criticism over its decision to support publishers though. Stevan Harnad, said: “The work JISC has been doing to promote open access journals has been positive and useful, but, in my own opinion, it has nevertheless been a waste of time and money, compared to what JISC could have done instead.
“JISC could and should be throwing all its (OA) efforts and resources into promoting OA self-archiving into institutional repositories .” Harnad believes the JISC support model and the present prices charged for publishing in Open Access journals are unrealistic or unsustainable.
“I think historians, in hindsight, will say it was appalling how much time we all wasted before at last getting around to self-archiving all of our research output,” Harnad said.
Fred Friend, scholarly communications consultant, said JISC will continue to work on both routes to open access, probably as separate strands : “It is partly political to keep them separate so that we can help publishers with the conversion of their business models without ill will about repositories. JISC does not believe repositories are a threat to publishers, but publishers believe they are.”
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