Serials Crisis - Open Access

Open Access

Developed in part as a response to the serials crisis, open access models have included new models of financing scholarly journals that may serve to reduce the monopoly power of scholarly journal publishers which is considered a contributing factor to the creation of the serials crisis. These include:

Open access journals where the reader of a journal or the library at their institution does not need to pay a subscription or a pay per-view charge to read the articles published in that journal. This free access is achieved through a number of basic models. First is the publication fee model in which a funding agency, a university, or the author(s) of an article pays a publication fee per article to ensure that it will be available to readers free of charge. Sometimes these journals will waive the publication fee if the author cannot pay. Secondly, some open access journals receive institutional subsidies or are grant funded, which makes it unnecessary for the journal to charge publication or subscription fees. This reliance on money from interested parties could conceivably lead to journals being forced to follow the agenda of the funding agency or government and thus may compromise editorial independence; however, much of the research conducted and submitted to scholarly journals throughout the world is funded by the aforementioned interested parties. A third model is for publications to be funded by advertisements if readership of the journal is sufficient to recoup costs.

Hybrid open access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that permit authors to pay a fee to make their article available free of charge to the reader. This gives the author the advantages of open access to their published research but subscribers continue to pay subscription fees for such journals to gain access to the restricted content. This model has been adopted by many of the commercial publishers and large scholarly societies. It has the potential to increase revenues for the publisher, while at the same time subjecting libraries to continuing price inflation. This model doesn't serve to end the serials crisis—unless the subscription price for a hybrid journal should decline in some fashion related to the proportion of the journal that has become open access. Oxford University Press announced on July 25, 2007 price reductions for 2008 calendar year online-only subscriptions for its "Oxford Open Journals", however, in many cases these subscription prices are still higher than 2007 calendar year subscriptions. The price reductions are only a reduction compared with the price Oxford University Press would have charged in the absence of Open Access content. Springer Verlag has outlined its intention to develop pricing based on changes in the proportion of Open Choice (TM) articles as compared to the subscription model articles, Hypothetically, this model could serve as an intermediary step in a switch to the widescale adoption of the open access journal model.

Delayed open access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide open access after an embargo period from the initial publication date. A subscription or an article purchase would be required to read the materials before the end of this embargo period. These journals may additionally deposit their publications in open repositories. Many scholarly society journals have adopted this model. While this model increases access to scholarly research literature for many, academic and research libraries that continue subscriptions end up paying for access to a rolling file of the most recent material of the embargo period only.