Scholarly Publishing News

Big news from a few big publishers.

This week the American Medical Association (AMA) opened up the archives of American Medical News to the world. The past ten years of the archive, plus some additional older articles, are now available on their website.

Also in the past week, SAGE announced SAGE Open, a new publication to support open access publishing in the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.  From SAGE: “SAGE Open seeks to be the world’s premier open access outlet for academic research. As such, unlike traditional journals, SAGE Open does not limit content due to page budgets or thematic significance. Rather, SAGE Open evaluates the scientific and research methods of each article for validity and accepts articles solely on the basis of the research. This approach allows readers greater access and gives them the power to determine the significance of each article through SAGE Open’s interactive comments feature and article-level usage metrics. Likewise, by not restricting papers to a narrow discipline, SAGE Open facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers, whether within or between disciplines.”

And finally, for Physicists, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced their new OA journal, AIP Advances. From their press release: ““The Web enables more alternatives in scientific publishing, which we can now deliver to the research community,” commented John Haynes, Vice President, Publishing. Our authors tell us that they want their articles to be published as quickly as possible and then made accessible to the widest possible audience. They also want the opportunity for their work to be recognized for its own worth, not necessarily within the context of established journals. AIP Advances is just another way AIP will help authors to get the recognition their work deserves.”

All articles are published under the Creative Commons license. Authors of accepted manuscripts pay a processing fee so their work is freely available worldwide immediately upon publication.  Accelerated peer review, overseen by a leading international team of Executive and Associate Editors, ensures rapid publication. The significance of each article is complemented through post-publication evaluation by the entire applied physical sciences community.

To celebrate the launch, AIP Publishing is offering free publication to the first 100 authors whose articles are accepted.”

In late October SFU announced its membership in COPE, the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equality.  By joining COPE, SFU has agreed to work towards supporting “new business models for the publication of open access journals. Specifically, the Compact commits each signatory to developing ways of underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”

SFU is supporting this drive in a number of ways, including the Library’s Open Access Fund, the Institutional Repository, and by participating in the PKP Project.  For more info about the COPE announcement, check out the news release.

If you missed John Willinsky and Andrew Feenberg’s talk “Critical Theory of Open in the Digital Era” at SFU during Open Access week, you’re in luck, because it’s now online.

Funder and institutional mandates for publishing Open Access are increasing at a rapid pace. In the last month alone, “–altogether 20 actions at 38 institutions in 9 countries (Australia, France, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, UK, USA)”.  Policies range from thesis to faculty, to institution wide OA mandates.  For more information, see issue 151 of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, written by Peter Suber.