ALPSP Roundtable on Open Access

Citation

(2003), "ALPSP Roundtable on Open Access", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2003.12231aab.018

ALPSP Roundtable on Open Access

ALPSP Roundtable on Open Access

A paper that will be of interest to ILL librarians looking for free sources for their readers: "On 13 September Raym Crow, SPARC Senior Consultant, presented a paper on converting existing journals to open access to a group of UK publishers in London. The round-table meeting, co-sponsored by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and the Open Society Institute (OSI), considered the future of journal publishing and, specifically, the opportunities (and threats) that open access brings to researchers, librarians, and publishers. Raym suggested that there is no single financial model for open access journals (where online access to the literature is free to all at the time of publication) and that different disciplines may require different solutions.

"Raym discussed a range of models (together with examples of where they had been used). Among these were: author publication fees, institution submission charges, sponsorship, offprint sales, differential versions (where the basic version is free and subscribers pay for an enhanced version), grants, institutional subsidies. Jan’Velterop, from BioMed Central, described how they use a combination of the first two of these models to provide open access to papers published in their 57 biology and medical titles.

"Researchers' needs were put forward by Les Carr (Southampton University), who outlined the requirement of his fellow scholars for the literature to be integrated and accessible so that they can gain access to all the relevant research they need and to ensure that others can access their research. Martin Richardson (Oxford University Press) described alternatives to open access for increasing dissemination of the literature – e.g. consortia and whole-country licensing.

"Overall, there was some consensus from the participants (who were mostly from small to medium not-for-profit publishes) that open access would be good for the research community. Many also articulated the challenge of migrating from subscription-based to open access, especially in Europe where authors have traditionally not had the funds to pay for publication."

Raym's presentation, together with those of the other round-table speakers, is available at http://www.alpsp.org/s130902.htm."

Source: SPARC e-news, August-September 2002.