Alternative Publishing Models

Access to scholarly information has traditionally been provided through academic journals, research collections, and other subscription based print publications. Recent advances in digital technology, however, have transformed scholarly communication, leading to innovations in the manner in which research is both conducted and accessed. At the same time, changing copyright laws, licensing rather than owning publications, and rapidly increasing subscription costs for scholarly journals have limited access to and restricted uses of scholarly information.

These factors have caused libraries, research institutions, scholarly societies, commercial publishers, and others, to develop a variety of alternative online publishing models. A number of models have emerged utilizing different approaches to handling publication costs, managing collections, and providing user access. The primary advantage of these alternative publishing models is that they provide unrestricted (free) access to all potential readers, as compared to traditional subscription or purchase-based publications.

Most alternative models also:

• include peer-review or other quality control measures;
• are available quickly or immediately after creation;
• are managed for long-term availability;
• are searchable through traditional search engines, such as Google, Google Scholar or new, community-built services.

There are a number of promising alternatives that merit consideration:

Open Access

There are currently two major strategies to fulfill the goals of the open access movement:

1. open access journals;
2. depositing of material in an institutional or discipline-based repository.

Open Access Journals

• Open-access journals are digital, online, free of charge to the reader, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, so there are no price barriers and no permission barriers.
• Open access is intended to be free for readers, but not for producers. Production costs are recovered through a variety of means, including publication fees, institutional subsidies, endowments, or sponsorships.
• Open access does not mean that peer review is bypassed. Peer review is as necessary for online journals as for print journals. Peer review can be carried out in cost efficient ways with new supporting software and technologies.
• Open access publishing probably has the potential for greatest impact in the scientific, technical, and medical fields where journal prices have increased the most and where a significant amount of research is government sponsored.
Arguably the most high profile open access journal currently published is PLoS Biology, directed by Vivian Siegel, former editor of Cell, which debuted in October 2003.
• Other open access journals can be found by using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This resource may be searched, browsed alphabetically by title, or browsed by subject.
• Submission to an open access journal is certain to remove the financial access barriers for potential readers of your work. Although open access journals are relatively new, evidence suggests that publishing with them may increase the reach and impact of your work.

Disciplinary and Institutional Digital Repositories

• Digital repositories provide free, online access to scholarly materials and can be organized by discipline or by institution.
• Repositories are intended to complement, rather than replace, other forms of publication. They can contain pre-publication materials, post-prints, seminar papers, conference papers, datasets, and more.
• One may, depending on the copyright agreement, often publish in a standard, high-impact journal, and also place the article or some form of it in a freely available public archive.
• Disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv (physics, mathematics, computer science, and qualitative biology) perform these same services for scholars within particular disciplines or groups of disciplines.
• Institutional repositories, such as DSpace and EPrints, collect, organize, disseminate, and preserve the digital scholarly output of a university’s faculty and staff.

The primary goals of institutional repositories are:

• Increased access to research: Material placed in repositories is freely available to anyone with a web connection, and can be discovered with search engines like Google. Thus, placing your work in a repository greatly increases its potential exposure and impact.
• Long-term preservation: Implicit in the concept of an institutional repository is a commitment to long-term preservation and storage. The repository is intended as a permanent, stable home for works of scholarship.

The Georgia State University Library launched its own Institutional Repository in August, 2007.

Scholarly Communication | The Issues |
Alternative Publishing Models | Copyright |
What Faculty Can Do | What the Library is Doing