Case Study: Open Access Yields Solid Growth for Hindawi

["Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@uncc.edu>]

Case Study: Open Access Yields Solid Growth for Hindawi
by Marji McClure

http://www.infotoday.com/it/may08/McClure.shtml

Information Today, May 12, 2008

"Hindawi, which was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in 
Cairo, Egypt, was just like any other publisher for its first 10 
years of business. But that changed in February 2007 when 
Hindawi, which had started to test the waters of open access (OA) 
journal articles a few years earlier, completed its full 
conversion to an OA publishing model."

..." Hindawi's OA initiative and the company's commitment to the 
pro-cess received a boost last November when it formed a 
partnership with SAGE, an international publisher of academic, 
educational, and professional journals and books. The alliance 
calls for the publishers to jointly publish a collection of OA 
journals. When the alliance was first announced, SAGE was 
publishing nearly 500 journals in the humanities, social 
sciences, and STM fields, while Hindawi was publishing more than 
100 OA journals."

... "Hindawi's journals are published under the OA model, meaning 
that the full text of the journal articles is freely accessible 
to all interested readers. Since OA journals can be viewed by 
anyone, no subscription is necessary. They are distributed under 
the Creative Commons attribution license, which allows for the 
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the articles. 
Article authors maintain the copyright to their work.

Hindawi's journals are available on the company's website 
(www.hindawi.com), and biomedical journals are also accessible 
via PubMed Central. A print-on-demand service enables readers to 
access the journals in printed form. However, most journals have 
only a few print subscribers, according to Peters. Authors pay 
for the publication of their work through article processing 
charges, which can range from EUR 400 to EUR 1,000 (about $600 to 
$1,500) per article, says Peters.

"Apart from their business model, these journals are run much the 
same way that traditional subscription-based journals are run," 
he says. "All of our journals have a thorough peer-review 
process, and we reject about 60% of the articles that are 
submitted to our journals.""

... "Hindawi began publishing OA journal articles in 2003 and 
steadily increased its number of published works annually. Still, 
the company has grown substantially since the total OA 
conversion. Hindawi received about 6,000 submissions in the 12 
months after the conversion, a 60% increase from the previous 
year, Peters says. Hindawi also launched about 40 new journal 
titles during that time. It's a pace that Hindawi expects to 
continue."

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223