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Effect of recession on publishing models

In a Correspondence in the current issue of Nature (458; 967, 2009), Raf Aerts of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven writes:

Your Commentaries on 'How to survive the recession' devote much discussion to the effects of the global recession on science (Nature 457, 957–963; 2009). However, the financial squeeze may also be affecting the publication output of research institutions in a more subtle way. It could be boosting the traditional reader-pays publication model for scientific journals at the expense of the author-pays, or open-access, model.
Open-access journals ask authors to pay for processing their manuscripts (which involves organizing a form of quality control, formatting and distribution) so that the final product becomes freely available, and free to use if properly attributed. This model is widely believed to increase the visibility, dissemination and, eventually, the citation and impact of research findings.
However, few peer-reviewed open-access journals have so far had a high impact factor in their field, except for a small number such as those published by the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central. They are therefore struggling to emerge and to attract the most prestigious research findings.
This situation could deteriorate further if open-access journals are forced to move to (partial) site licensing in order to cover their production costs — a shift recently undertaken by the Journal of Visualized Experiments, for example as authors become increasingly reluctant or unable to pay in the current financial climate.

(This is an slightly shortened version of the Correspondence. The full version is available online at Nature's website.)

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 28, 2009
Categories: Access, Publishing | | Comments (2)

Comments

I think it's rather the other way around: As publishers stick to price increases, world wide libraries have to cancel thousands and thousands of journal titles due to recession-shrinked budgets. As a consequence, a severe vicious circle with ever increasing prices is initiated. The result may well be such high barriers for scientific output that researchers are hasten to Open Access journals.

Posted by: Oliver Obst | April 28, 2009 12:25 PM

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