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MAIN OPEN ACCESS PROJECTSThis page complements our page concerning existing Open Access Journals that were listed by subject. Here we present the main OPEN ACCESS projects, along an approximate chronological order, starting with pioneering projects which concern either archives or journals. Projects may be classified as Archives, Journals or Initiatives. Software topics that relate to Open Access projects are also listed.
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ArXiv is one of the most significant success story of the Internet age. The "xxx archive" at Los Alamos, started at August 91 by Dr. Paul Ginsparg as a service for a community of less than 200 physicists. ( Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village P. Ginsparg, 1996 ). The archive URL is now ArXiv.org, X meant for the greek Khi letter.
According to
a 2001 Press Release:
the arXiv has operated with about $300,000 in annual funding
from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and LANL..
In 2001, the "xxx archive" moved to Cornell University Library. Paul Ginsparg is now Physics professor at Cornell University. Ginsparg has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2000 in part for "for establishment and development of the revolutionary Los Alamos E-Print Archive." He has also received the "genius award" MacArthur Fellowhip. It is quite significant that Dr. Ginsparg's oustanding achievements have been recognized as being an integral part of his scientific work. Such an open minded point of view is unfortunately lacking in some fossilized scientific circles in old Europe. |
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Dr. Steven Harnard proposed in June 1994 a "Subversive Proposal" that has been an inspiration for the Open Archive Initiative movement : If all scholars' preprints were universally available to all scholars by anonymous ftp (and gopher, and World-Wide Web, and the search/retrieval wonders of the future), NO scholar would ever consent to WITHDRAW any preprint of his from the public eye after the refereed version was accepted for paper "PUBLICation." Instead, everyone would, quite naturally, substitute the refereed, published reprint for the unrefereed preprint. Paper publishers will then either restructure themselves (with the cooperation of the scholarly community) so as to arrange for the much-reduced electronic-only page costs (which I estimate to be less than 25% of paper-page costs, contrary to the 75% figure that appears in most current publishers' estimates) to be paid out of advance subsidies (from authors' page charges, learned society dues, university publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies) or they will have to watch as the peer community spawns a brand new generation of electronic-only publishers who will. A "softer" strategy, has been proposed (2004) :
According to the OAI meeting history, the first OAI meeting was organized in October 21-22 1999, in Santa Fe, by Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, Herbert Van de Sompel. Stevan Harnad (CogPrints) was among the participants. In comparison to ArXiv.org which is a centralized Archive ( even if there are mirrors ), the OAI is a network of distributed archives. It is highly desirable that the OAI distributed archives could interact together. The technical breaktrough (S. Hardnard , The self-archiving initiative, 26 April 2001 Nature 410, 1024 - 1025 (2001) ) is agreement on metadata tagging standards that make the contents of distributed archives interoperable, hence harvestable into one global virtual archive, all papers searchable and retrievable by everyone for free. The open archives initiative (OAI) has now provided the metadata tagging standards and a registry for all OAI-compliant eprint archives. The self-archiving initiative is providing free software for institutions to create OAI-compliant archives, interoperable with all other open archives, ready to be registered and for their contents to be harvested into searchable global archives, interlinked to one another by citations (see The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is supported by the Digital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information, National Science Foundation Grant (Project Prism)). With the help of the Open Source GNU EPrints software (C. Gutteridge et al., University of Southampton) it is possible to create OAI-compliant archives. OAI-compliance means that all Archives created in this way are "interoperable." They use the same (OAI) convention for tagging their metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.). That means the contents of all such Archives can be harvested integrated, navigated and searched seamlessly, as if they were all in one global "virtual" archive. There have been a first version of Eprints ( List of OAI1 Archives ) There is now a second version (List of OAI2 Archives). EPrints software may be be used in Strategy 1 (self-archiving) of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. EPrints software can also be used to create OAI-compliant Archives of open-access journals (BOAI Strategy 2). In that scenario, each Open Access Journal becomes its own Open Archive to become a part of a worldwide Open Access ressource. |
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Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) is a nonprofit Foundation for deposit and exchange of molecular and biomolecular samples, based in Switzerland. MDPI, directed by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, based in Switzerland. The journal Molecules was launched by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin in Switzerland in 1995 with Springer-Verlag. After winning a litigation with Springer-Verlag, Dr. Shu-Kun Lin kept the title Molecules and started in 1996 the first (to our knowledge) Open Access journal in Chemistry. Now MDPI operates 5 Open Access journals. Editorial boards of MDPI journals include 7 Nobel prize winners. Molecules since 1996 Two new journals are currently being planned. Along with the online free edition, a printed edition project has started ( A joint MDPI/ENSTA project ). MDPI has received some financial support through Budapest Open Access Initiative - Open Society Institute that allow to offer a publication charge waiver to residents of 67 countries. MDPI has also received staff and financial support from the Ocean University of China. MDPI is going to make efforts so that its journals can be harvested both with OAI protocols (see above) and Semantic Web protocols. Dr. Francis Muguet and Dr. Shu-Kun Lin have recently set forward a series of proposals concerning open multi-actor federative projects where international collaboration and support is seeked :
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PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's digital archive of life sciences journal literature. Do not confuse PMC with PubMed which is a web site that contains a database of citations and abstracts, not a full-text archive. This official state-supported archive project is developed and managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed Central (PMC) was launched in February 2000 with content from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and from Molecular Biology of the Cell. As stated : PubMed Central follows in the footsteps of other highly successful and useful services that NCBI has developed for the worldwide scientific community: GenBank, the genetic sequence data repository, and PubMed, the database of citations and abstracts to biomedical and other life science journal literature. Participation by publishers in PubMed Central (PMC) is voluntary, although participating journals must meet certain editorial standards. A participating journal is expected to include all its peer reviewed primary research articles in PMC. ... A journal may deposit its material in PMC and make it available for public release as soon as it is published, or it may delay release in PMC for a specified period after initial publication. ... Copyright remains with the journal publisher or with individual authors, whichever is applicable. A key point is that participating publishers must physically give the content of articles to the PMC archive, under certain constraints : Storing all articles in a uniform and well defined (tagged) structure allows other features, e.g., searches focused on the Methods section of articles, or links from the literature to existing resources such as sequence databases and structure viewers, to be applied consistently across the entire collection. ... Experience to date suggests that participation in PMC may actually improve the quality of the journal's electronic archival record, because PMC conducts an independent check of the SGML/XML for syntactical correctness and the ability to generate an accurate reproduction of an article from the supplied data. ... PubMed Central does not change the content of submitted articles in any way. PMC also offers a number of presentation options to ensure that each journal's presentation needs are satisfied. ... Participating journals must supply the full text of articles to PubMed Central in an SGML or XML format which conforms to any established DTD for journal articles. Figures should be supplied as high resolution (TIFF or Encapsulated PostScript) images. A PDF may be submitted in addition to the SGML/XML version of an article, but not as the primary (or only) electronic form of the article. ... if the submitted data does not satisfy PMC's requirement for syntactically correct and complete data. PMC staff will support publishers' staff as needed in this process. A journal that does not currently produce SGML/XML versions of its articles would have to add this process to its production stream. According to PLoS history page : In 1999, Dr. Harold Varmus, then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), presented an ambitious proposal for NIH to develop and operate an electronic publishing site that would provide barrier-free access to the peer-reviewed and pre-peer-reviewed life sciences literature. The plan evolved considerably in a year of vigorous public discussion. The result, PubMed Central (PMC), was launched in February 2000 with content from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Molecular Biology of the Cell. To allay publishers' concerns about lost revenues, participating publishers were not required to deposit material immediately upon publication, with most opting for a delay of between six months and a year. Despite these allowances, few journals followed PNAS and MBC in joining PMC. Many publishers expressed opposition to the venture, and lobbying efforts were initiated to have PMC funding cut off. For more information concerning PMC check the PMC FAQs. and Information for Publishers. |
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To our knowledge, BioMed Central is the only commercial publisher that has adopted an Open Access business model. UK-based BioMed Central currently publishes 75 open access journals in biology and medicine. BioMed Central supports PubMed Central and other digital repositories, as well as encouraging self-archiving by authors BioMed Central satisfies the demands outlined in the open letter from the Public Library of Science. BioMed Central promotes Open Access Seminars and supplies well-made researchers' advocacy kit. and librarians' advocacy kit . Publication charges : a flat fee of US$500 for each accepted manuscript. Discounts of US $50 are available if authors submit their manuscript formatted with Endnote 5/6 or Reference Manager 10 ... Waiver requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis, before the manuscript has been submitted. Waivers may be made in cases of lack of funds. ... A waiver will be granted if the submitting author's institution is a BioMed Central member. BioMed proposes a clever Institutional Membership program. In a few words, researchers at those institutions, do not pay publication fees, their institution pay for them on fixed yearly basis. The cost varies from $1550/year for very small institutions ( 20-500 faculty and postgraduate students in biology and medicine) up to $7750/year for very large institutions (more than 5000 faculty and postgraduate students in biology and medicine) It include a 15% discount on any of the subscription subscription products BioMed Central publishes. BioMed Central has now a significant number of Institutional Members: eg, the World Health Organization, in the USA : Harvard Johns Hopkins, Scripps,, in France INSERM, CNRS ; in Germany Max Planck ) BioMed offers also a similar Corporate Membership program. The Open Society Institute (OSI/SOROS) has agreed to provide funding to support 50 BioMed Central Institutional memberships for institutions in countries where the Soros foundation's network is active. This is quite interesting to see that the SOROS foundation is supporting a commercial publisher. The grant (duration one year) also includes a 15% discount on any of the subscription products BioMed Central publishes (such as review journals and databases). |
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Librarians are one group of
people that are specificaly outraged
by the greed of commercial publishers are librarians
It is interesting to
read the illumanating study by Jean-Claude Gu�don
In Oldenburg's Long Shadow:
Librarians, Researchers, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing which
uncovers all the mechanisms that led to the current catastrophic status.
It is not uncommoun to hear librarians
saying they cannot understand how scientists may tolerate the current situation,
as subscription fees are rising while libraries budgets are shrinking.
Thereforen it not surprising that some efforts have been initiated by
librarians in favour of Open Access.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
supports
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Ressource Coalition ):
SPARC is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations built as
a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system.
These dysfunctions have reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries.
SPARC serves as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that expand information dissemination
and use in a networked digital environment
while responding to the needs of scholars and academe.
Today membership in SPARC numbers approximately 200 institutions in North America,
Europe, Asia, and Australia.
It is working with the Ligue des Biblioth�ques Europ�ennes de Recherche (LIBER) and
other European organizations to establish SPARC Europe, and is
investigating the potential for a similar initiative in Japan. SPARC also is affiliated with
major library organizations in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand,
the UK and Ireland, and North America.
SPARC has a few Publisher Partners among which seven are offering Open Access Journals :
SPARC members pledge through a purchase commitment to support the SPARC-endorsed journals that fit their collection development agenda. .. SPARC members have an extremely strong record of purchasing SPARC-endorsed journals and participating in related initiatives.... SPARC-endorsed journals are both print and electronic. All SPARC-endorsed journals that appear in print also appear as web editions. SPARC library subscription support gives journals a strong readership from the first few issues forward. This subscription base is the foundation upon which a new journal can build prestige, attract authors, and become a true alternative. SPARC's financial support of journals generally takes the form of subscriptions placed by its members rather than through direct funding. SPARC provides many other services to its publisher-partners, including: an advisory role in the planning and development phases; advertising, publicity and promotion to the broad marketplace; and sales and marketing focused on encouraging SPARC member purchases. SPARC's Scientific Communities Initiative, a one-time grant program announced in spring 1999, awarded $500,000 in development funds to three new electronic journals: Columbia Earthscape, MIT CogNet, and eScholarship (California Digital Library). These funds are administered over a three-year period. The awardees are now part of SPARC's Scientific Communities program. SPARC set forward three main advocacy documents : The BOAI guides : Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-based Journal to Open Access and Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal have been prepared with the help of the SPARC Consulting Group. |
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The Budapest Open Access Initiative is not a project per se but a landmark event (February 14, 2002). For the first time, a clear strategy was stated that considers both the Open Archives initiative and the Open Access Journal movement : To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies.
Among those who signed : Michael Eisen (PLoS) Jean-Claude Gu�don, Stevan Harnad(OAI), Peter Suber (Free Online Scholarship), Jan Velterop (BioMed). Another significant aspect was the official support to the strategy by the SOROS whose officers (Darius Cuplinska, Melissa Hagemann) cosigned the declaration. This declaration has been also cosigned by Rick Johnson (SPARC) and the declaration has been reported by the ARL. For more information check the BOAI FAQ. by Peter Suber. |
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According to PLoS history page : We circulated an open letter calling on scientific publishers to make the primary research articles they publish available through online public libraries of science such as PubMed Central. The open letter was signed by over 30,000 scientists from 180 countries. This initiative prompted some significant and welcome steps by many scientific publishers towards freer access to published research, but in general the publishers' responses fell short of the reasonable policies we advocated. This petition ( Deadline: September 1, 2001 ) was an extremely effective Public Relation campaign, which raised the awareness of the scientific community to Open Archive themes. It stirred an ongoing debate. Some publishers and learned societies such as the American Physiological Society or the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology ( "we will not transfer our free content to PubMed Central" ) are openly opposed to it. It seems that the "boycott" was not effective enough to force publishers to comply with PLoS demands. The PLOS petition project turned into an Open Access Journal project of its own. In December 2002, as a consequence of the stunning news that the Public Library of Science gets a $9 Million Grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, it is expected that this late entry Journal player is going to play a predominant role in Open Access publishing. Excerpts from PLoS web site :PLoS is going to accept submissions to PLoS Biology as of May 1, 2003. The first issue is planned for October 2003. PLoS Medicine will launch in mid-2004. Once these initial journals are established, PLoS Publications plans to expand into other fields (e.g., PLoS Chemistry and PLoS Computer Science) and launch field-specific journals that publish articles of a more specialized interest (e.g., PLoS Genetics or PLoS Oncology). PLoS Biology Publication Charges : Authors are asked to pay $1500 upon acceptance of their article, to help defray the costs of publication. However, if you have insufficient funds to cover this payment, we will allow payment of whatever amount you can afford or will waive the charge entirely. Inability to pay will never influence the decision whether to publish a paper. The charges for publishing works in PLoS journals will reflect our actual expenses. We expect these costs to decline over time, as automated systems for document handling and production become more efficient, and we will regularly reevaluate our charges to keep them in line with expenses. A Summary of the April 11, 2003 Meeting on Open-Access Publishing (June 20, 2003) has been recently released. It includes a definition of Open Access, as well as several other valuable recommandations. The PloS has also sponsored a bill. |
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