[Air-l] Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing

Art McGee amcgee at virtualidentity.org
Mon Apr 14 11:39:51 PDT 2003


http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i02/Willinsky/

John Willinsky, Scholarly Associations and the Economic
Viability of Open Access Publishing, Journal of Digital
Information, 4, 2 (April 9, 2003)

Abstract: "The paper considers a number of economic issues
that scholarly associations are confronting in moving their
journals online, with a focus on the possible viability of
an open access or free-to-read format. It explores the
current content overlap between subscription-based and open
access sources, and considers how these redundancies favor
open access publishing and indexing. It utilizes the tax
returns for 20 US non-profit scholarly associations to
analyze current publishing revenues against costs, arguing
that the associations could make up the loss of revenue
posed by the open access publishing model through cost
savings and other revenue sources, while serving their
membership better through the increased readership in an era
of declining subscriptions. While the decision to publish
journals in an open access format is by no means simply
an economic one, the viability of open access publishing
warrants serious consideration by scholarly associations
that are currently determining what this new medium may
mean for the circulation of knowledge."

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