Re: Stop fighting the inevitable - and free funds for open access!

["Charles W. Bailey, Jr." <cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com>]

Ahmed:

My reply was not about Hindawi's publishing practices, but thanks 
for your interesting description of them.

Rather, it was about a common misunderstanding between some 
Gold-road OA advocates and conventional publishers about the cost 
of e-journal production. For a significant number of small OA 
journals published out of university departments and libraries, 
the costs I outlined are in effect.  This is a very different 
model than is used by mainstream publishers, be they commercial, 
university press, or large association publishers. This 
significant difference of "business models" can lead to very 
understandable difficulties in dialogs about costs. The model I 
outlined can work for certain types of journals, but this does 
not mean that it scales up well and can be used without 
modification for all types of journals.

This quote from my paper "What Is Open Access?" may help to 
explain this further:

Non-Traditional Publishers: During the late 1980s and early 
1990s, the Internet had developed to the point that scholars 
began to publish free digital journals utilizing existing 
institutional infrastructure and volunteer labor (e.g., EJournal, 
PostModern Culture, and The Public-Access Computer Systems 
Review). These journals were not intended to generate income; 
they were "no-profit" journals. Although many of these journals 
allowed authors to retain their copyrights and they had liberal 
copyright statements regarding noncommercial use, they preceded 
by a decade or more the Creative Commons, and, consequently, did 
not embody that kind of copyright stance. While some of these 
journals ceased publication and others were transformed into 
non-profit ventures, they provided a model that others followed, 
especially after the popularization of the Internet began in the 
mid-1990s, which followed the earlier introduction of Web 
browsers.

In recent years, the availability of free open source journal 
management and publishing systems, such as the Open Journal 
Systems, further simplified and streamlined digital journal 
publishing, fueling additional growth in this area. Now, a wide 
variety of academic departments or schools, institutes and 
research centers, libraries, professional associations, scholars, 
and others publish digital journals, a subset of which comply 
with the strictest definition of an open access journal and a 
larger subset which comply with the looser definition of an open 
access journal as a free journal. Since these diverse 
"publishers" would have been unlikely to be engaged in this 
activity without facilitating digital technologies and tools, I 
refer to them as "non-traditional publishers." Many of them are 
also "no-profit" publishers as well.

Best Regards,

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
E-Mail: cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com
Publications: http://www.digital-scholarship.org/


Ahmed Hindawi wrote:

 > Charles:
 >
 > Since Sally was pointing out to Hindawi's OA publication fees,
 > I'd like to reply to your points below:

  [SNIP]