Emerald OA experiment pays in kind

In exchange for open publication on Emerald Asset authors will be asked to submit a summary of their research findings highlighting their practical application.

Emerald Asset will run throughout 2007. The level of author participation and the quality of the summaries will be reviewed at the end of the year when a decision will be made about whether to continue the trial.

Gill Etienne, head of corporate communications at Emerald, said, “As a publisher we are always seeking good quality content and new ways to encourage readers to access the research we publish. There seemed a good synergy between these two goals and the Asset trial aims to discover whether this is indeed the case.”

This groundbreaking open access model has been some time in gestation. Several years ago Emerald worked with SPARC Europe to try and convert one of its library journals to an author pays open access model. “Although there were a few keen supporters of this model among LIS authors, the feedback we received then was that there was insufficient research funding in the LIS field to make this a viable option. Additionally, a large number of authors were simply just not interested in open access at that time,” Etienne said.

Authors will be asked assign copyright of their work to Emerald on the basis that authors retain key rights to re-use their work as they wish, including self archiving their Microsoft Word version (including editorial and peer review changes) of their article, with acknowledgement. Emerald is Romeo coded green, allowing authors to archive both pre-print and post-print copies.

Etienne said, “Participants in the Asset trial will continue to retain key rights to re-use their work as they wish both for their research paper and their summary. The summary pages link to the definitive published version of the research paper in the Emerald database. As such, it will be freely accessible in both the EMX journal database and via the summary on the Emerald Engineering web site.”

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