Support Publishing Experiments and New Business Models

You can help reshape scholarly communication by examining and supporting transformative business models that have the potential to create more sustainable economics for scholarly publishing.

Use, promote, and cite journals that commit to reasonable pricing practices: See a list of publishers committed to fair pricing and copyright policies at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) web site. See a description of society publishing best practices.

Examine the ideas and experiments in open access: Open access can be a confusing term, referring to both a goal (achieving unfettered access to scholarship regardless of the underlying means to support publishing and access) and, in some cases, a business model that achieves unfettered access (moving the source of supporting revenues from subscriptions to read the publications to charges levied for publishing). The SPARC open access newsletter, compiled by Peter Suber of Earlham College, includes a well-written overview of open access.

Read, promote, and cite open-access journals: More than 2,200 peer-reviewed journals in a wide range of disciplines are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Use open access repositories: Thousands of articles are available, and more than 200 UC departments and research units already participate in UC's eScholarship Repository. eScholarship is only one of a rapidly expanding set of institutional and disciplinary repositories. The contents of these repositories are made available through library databases and web services such as Google and OAIster.

Watch for other experiments: A transition to sustainable scholarly communication requires creative approaches and experiments in publishing.

• The endowment approach: Sometimes compared to the way National Public Radio is funded, this approach seeks to create contributions or an endowment that covers production costs (in perpetuity) for open access resources. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is attempting such an approach.
• Hybrids: The Oxford University Press and Springer are among those publishers experimenting with a mixed funding model, attempting open access funded by publication charges to some of their content while maintaining subscription funding to most of it.
• Government encouragement and mandates: In May 2006, Senators Cornyn and Lieberman introduced a bill that would require that articles based on reseaarch funded by the 10 largest federal research funding agencies be made available for open, public access. This follows a similar groundbreaking policy initiated in 2005 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring that articles based on NIH-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH's open-access digital repository. Similar but more far-reaching recommendations have been made by the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. These developments are covered in our list of news and issues.