Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing 英文参考文献.docVIP

Perspective EquityforOpen-AccessJournalPublishing StuartM.Shieber* SchoolofEngineeringandAppliedSciences,HarvardUniversity,Cambridge,Massachusetts,UnitedStatesofAmerica Scholars write articles to be read—the moreaccesstotheirarticlesthebetter—so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all without interpositionofanaccessfee,wouldbean attractive competitor to traditional sub- scription-basedjournalpublishing. is, from the subscription fees paid by the institutions’researchlibraries.Theexpect- ed result—inelasticity of demand and hyperinflation—can be amply seenin the statistics of serials costs paid by research libraries[1].Assubscriptionfeeshyperin- flate, libraries with budgets that at best merely match inflation must inevitably dropsubscriptions,reducingaccesstothe scholarlyliterature.Theproblemhasbeen dramatically exacerbated by the current economicdownturn. Some research insti- tutions, including my own, are beginning are, of course, the flagship examples of journals using this business model. But thereareseveralthousandotherso-called open-accessjournalsoperatinginallareas ofscholarship.Althoughbydefinitionthey donotchargeanaccessfeepaidbyoron behalf of a reader, they can still acquire revenue by charginganarticle processing feepaidbyoronbehalfoftheauthor. In fact, only a minority of the extant open-access journals actually charge pro- cessing fees, as first confirmed by the Kaufman-Wills Group [2] and recon- But open-access journal publishing is currently at a systematic disadvantage relativetothetraditionalmodel. Iproposeasimple,cost-effectivereme- dy to this inequity that would put open- access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the twojournalpublishingsystemstocompete onamorelevelplayingfield.Theissueis important,first,becauseacademicinstitu- tions shouldn’t perpetuate barriers to an open-access business model on principle and, second, because the s