Are Scientific Journals Recognizing The Value Of Open Access Publishing?

from the that-would-be-good-news dept

Tue, Oct 14th 2008 6:58pm — Mike Masnick

We've had numerous articles over the years concerning the rise of "open access" scientific journals, which focus on making the research they publish openly available (usually online) to anyone who wants it, rather than the more traditional method of going through ridiculously expensive journals. This movement has certainly gained plenty of steam in the past fast years, even as many of the traditional publishers have done everything possible to fight it.

However, as SteveD points out to us, last week one of the big traditional publishers, Springer Science+Business Media acquired one of the more successful open access journals, BioMed Central, which has shown that it's possible to be an open access journal and profitable at the same time (wonders never cease). The author of the article notes, correctly, that it would certainly be a good thing if the old-line journals are finally recognizing that open access journals are an important and profitable part of scientific discussion, rather than just fighting them at every turn.

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Filed Under: copyright, journals, open access, research

6 Comments

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some old guy, 14 Oct 2008 @ 7:46pm

I've seen this before
Embrace, Extend, ... shoot, can't remember what comes next.
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Kevin Donovan, 14 Oct 2008 @ 8:01pm

It's Open Access Day, fyi
http://openaccessday.org/
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NotBob, 14 Oct 2008 @ 11:34pm

The pessimist perspective
I have a feeling this is more along the lines of what EA does. Embrace, extinguish, end of competitor. Hopefully, I'll be wrong and Mike will be right...

NB
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Evan, 15 Oct 2008 @ 3:00am

This shows also the inherent risk in publishing in such a media. It is possible that once in a private domain, these "open source" entities can be shut down and all the published articles become unavailable. Unilike paper journals, in which libraries have copies of, the servers that store these articles may be the only source of a particular article. Perhaps a public web library should be mandated in order to ensure they are always available.
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anonymous, 16 Oct 2008 @ 8:15am

Yes, but look at the reason why the publisher sold out. The open access journals were running at a loss. That's not a good business model.
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Woadan, 16 Oct 2008 @ 9:31am

One wonders if they bought them in order to shut them down.

Woadan
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