To review the basics of the Open Access
model- open access means anyone has access to the full text of a
publication, journal or book, on the web, with no limitations except possibly a
requirement to register. Two terms commonly used to describe open access papers
are gold and green. Gold journals are intended to be open access from the
start. Green open access journals means the author has posted copies of their
manuscripts, published elsewhere, to open access sites on the web.
There are government supported data bases
of open access materials, but there are also for profit open access journals
and some publishers have enough to organize them into databases.
One I find interesting is Hindawi
Publishing Corporation
(www.hindawi.com). They make
their money in three ways. They charge
fees of up to $1500 to authors to include their articles in one of 466
different peer review journals. An
institution, such as a university or research institute, can pay an annual
subscription and submit their staff’s articles without further payment. Finally Hindawi sells hard copies of their
magazines.
An Egyptian based corporation, Hindawi has
flourished despite falling library budgets worldwide because its main source of
income is author fees, usually paid from grants.
Hindawi’s most important resource is the respect
of the academic community. Authors will only
pay to be published if it improves their academic standing.
However Hindawi faces the continuous problem
of maintaining standards using volunteer reviewers, who hope being members of
the editorial board will increase their standing. Each
article is reviewed by five editorial board members. If they disagree about the article’s value or
accuracy they then each read the others report and have a chance to change
their mind
The success of their system can be judged
by the fact that in 2011 all the articles in 90 of Hindawi’s journals were included
in PubMed Central. This open-access repository of biomedical articles is funded
by the National Institute of Health. Also all of Hindawi’s journals are included in
the Directory of Open Access Journals and Google Scholars.
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