Thursday, 13 January 2011

New OA journal from Nature

You may be interested in the announcement of a new journal from Nature Publishing that it is to be fully Open Access. While the majority of Nature’s journals already have an open access option, this is a significant move for such a major publisher. The business model for Scientific Reports will mean it is freely available to the global research community without subscription.

From their website: http://www.nature.com/srep/marketing/index.html

"Online and open access, Scientific Reports is a brand new primary research publication from the publishers of Nature, covering all areas of the natural sciences - biology, chemistry, physics and earth sciences.

Scientific Reports exists to facilitate the rapid peer review and publication of research that is of interest to specialists within any given field in the natural sciences, without barriers to access."

Article fees for 2011 are only £890, and the journal meets the requirements for Wellcome-funded outputs. It aims to have an Impact Factor by 2013.

Further comment from Bill Hubbard on the RSC blog

Times Higher Education looks at the possible effects on subscription models in an article about Nature's launch

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Increasing our open access content

The results of a JISC project have been useful in populating Research@StAndrews:FullText. The MERIT project, which collated and enhanced RAE2008 submission data, provides a searchable database that can be analysed by institution and subject area. I describe how we have used the data on the RSP blog.

Monday, 10 January 2011

Alternative funding model for Open Access journals

A report for Knowledge Exchange puts forward a business model based on submission fees as a way to help journals become Open Access.

The report 'Submission Fees – a tool in the transition to open access?' by Mark Ware concludes that there could be benefits in adopting a model where authors pay a fee when submitting articles, but publishers are as yet unsure about the advantages. Funders also need to be more explicit about whether these costs could be claimed from research grants.