Abstract
Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community has been digitised and can be accessed in full on this website. All content is freely available on an open-access basis. Serials was published between 1988 and 2011. In 2012, the journal was retitled and is now published as Insights: the UKSG journal.
Highlights
It seems that hardly a day can go by these days without some new policy or initiative being announced that will ‘reform’ the process of publishing scholarly journals, retaining the benefits of the current system that authors and readers enjoy, whilst doing away with the non-essential parts – those aspects that are both costly and low-value in the eyes of the initiators of change.In reality, the business of publishing research articles is a complex one
As Roosendaal and Geurts described in 19971, any system of scholarly communication requires the ‘registration’ of a research finding, its subsequent ‘validation’, creating ‘awareness’, ‘archiving’, and ‘reward’ for the author. This is a complex process, which the current system supports – from the record of the date that the manuscript arrives with the publisher, through peer review, the publication in a journal and listing in current awareness resources, preservation of online and print versions by libraries and the prestige and/or impact factor of the journal itself, ensuring that authors are rewarded for their efforts
Articles were deposited with PubMed Central (PMC) after a six-month delay. When we removed this delay period in January 2005, the number of downloads increased to 150,000, and by March 2005 was approaching a quarter of a million. This provides evidence that a ‘no delay’ policy of authors depositing postprints of their articles in PMC is likely to result in such repositories rapidly becoming high-usage resources, which could in turn lead to cancelled subscriptions, as readers turn instead to PMC and institutional repositories for access to journal articles
Summary
It seems that hardly a day can go by these days without some new policy or initiative being announced that will ‘reform’ the process of publishing scholarly journals, retaining the benefits of the current system that authors and readers enjoy, whilst doing away with the non-essential parts – those aspects that are both costly and low-value in the eyes of the initiators of change. As Roosendaal and Geurts described in 19971, any system of scholarly communication requires the ‘registration’ of a research finding, its subsequent ‘validation’, creating ‘awareness’, ‘archiving’, and ‘reward’ for the author. This is a complex process, which the current system supports – from the record of the date that the manuscript arrives with the publisher, through peer review, the publication in a journal and listing in current awareness resources, preservation of online and print versions by libraries and the prestige and/or impact factor of the journal itself, ensuring that authors are rewarded for their efforts. The three models around which we have based our experimentation are: (1) partial open access, (2) full open access, (3) institutional and subject repositories
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