OA in Latest Library Journal Serials Pricing Article

Open Access is mentioned several times in the latest version of the annual serials pricing issue (as well as looking at prices over the last several years, the article usually provides a summary of the major issues in the journal world since the previous report). In fact, OA is noted as occupying "center stage in the journals marketplace in 2005, eclipsing issues of price, publisher mergers, and big deals". Some of the items covered are:

• The increase in the number of journals included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (www.doaj.org). The article notes that, as of mid-February 2006, DOAJ contained 2,044 OA journals, up over 600 from the same period in 2005 (as of this morning, DOAJ was at 2184).
• The high impact factors for some OA journals, especially notable considering the youth of these journals. PLOS Biology and some BMC titles are given as examples
• The research that shows "that OA articles generate between 25% and 250% more citations than non-OA articles in the same journal from the same year". This comes from the "oft-quoted" article "Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact" (IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47, eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11688)
• The report from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) that shows that subscription-based journals are more likely to charge author fees than OA journals are. This report also indicates that 40% of OA journals are still in the red financially.
• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Research Councils of the UK (RCUK) situations. These involved recommendations to direct scholars to deposit their research results (articles) in OA repositories.
• The OA options offered by commercial journal publishers. The article mentions Open Choice from Springer (http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,,1-40359-0-0-0,00.html; affects 1200 journals), Online Open from Blackwell (http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/static/onlineopen.asp; affects 80 journals), Oxford Open from Oxford University Press (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/; affects 42 journals), and Author Select from the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/press_release/author_select.html; affects 3 journals).
• The fact that over 90% of scholarly publishers allow article pre- and/or post-prints to be deposited in subject and/or institutional repositories by authors (see SHERPA for a list: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php), though not many authors are doing this.

The complete LJ article can be found at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6321722.html