The convergence of two central forces - widespread dissatisfaction over high journal pricing and development of online publishing technology - is fundamentally changing the system for scholarly publishing. Publishers, whether commercial or not-for-profit, are being challenged by authors, readers and librarians to answer "where do you add value?" and "how can you make this process more cost-effective?". The outcome illustrated here is that the market now sees clearly how it is possible to take more control.

  Phil Davis and several colleagues at Cornell have conducted a  rigorous randomized controlled trial of articles in the 11 journals of the American Physiological Society to study how open  access affects article downloads and citations.  The key findings  are that while downloads increased, citations did not within the  first year following publication. The article is available in the BMJ.

 How often do economists self-archive? By Bergstrom TC, Lavaty R. (2007). The article answers some thorny questions such as can subscription-based journals survive if self-archiving becomes much more widespread? The authors analyze a portion of the journal literature in economics compared with political science for evidence of the impact of self-archiving. The article concludes with the statement - “the benefits of self-archiving to the academic community are twofold. There is the direct effect of making a greater portion of the body of research available to scholars everywhere and the secondary effect of reducing the prices charged by publishers who exploit their monopoly power.”

 A report in Science entitled “Open Access and Global participation in Science” by Evans and Reimer suggests that research articles published Open Access are not necessarily read or cited more than those accessed through the traditional paid subscription route. As is clear from the chart above “In three areas, OA confers no additional attention, including physics, where preprint and publication databases already provide nearly complete access, and the social sciences, where personal preprint archiving and lengthy review times are common” (The third area is chemistry).  The authors concluded that “Across subfields, the impact of commercial online availability was positive, statistically significant, and on average 40% larger than the OA effect, suggesting that most researchers rely on institutional subscriptions.” The authors did show that online OA had the greatest effect in the developing Southern Hemisphere. The sample of articles studied was of more than 26 million published articles.

A: Percentage increase in citations for sub fields after free online availability, 1998–2005. Online availability is measured in the previous year. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals (source: Science Vol 323 page 1025 Feb 20th 2009).

 www.journalprices.com for a database (now in beta stage) on journal cost-effectiveness arranged by subject, and by publisher and with the costs per article and citation information for a large number of journals in science, medicine, technology, law and social science. It is well worth trying this out to see how your journal(s) rank.

 SPARC the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, supports Open Access initiatives on a variety of fronts including Peter Suber’s SPARC Open Access newsletter which is a rich resource of the latest OA news.

 Software such as Paracite enables researchers to preferentially retrieve free copies of information.

 In the UK JISC and the Open Society Institute commissioned a survey of journal authors about Open Access publishing which is now completed and the report  by Key Perspectives Ltd, is available from the JISC site.

 A recent article provides current data on the effect of Open Access and author self-archiving on citation measures; “Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals” . The data shows clearly that in physics, more access equals more citations. Other disciplines are under investigation.

Figure 1 shows the total number of journal articles in physics indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information from 1992-2001 (gray), the percentage of these that have been made open-access (OA) by author self-archiving (green), and the ratio of the citation counts for the OA articles to the citation counts for the non-OA articles (red). (Analyses are by Brody et al. (2004) and are based on the ®ISI CD-ROM* citation database metadata and references from 14,000,000 articles in 7,000 leading journals from 1991 to 2001 licensed to the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies http://www.ost.qc.ca and from the 260,000 articles self-archived iin http://www.arxiv.org.)

 In a strong rebuttal of the “Open Access is for everyone” movement, some 48 not-for-profit publishers – all published online by High Wire Press  - have released the DC principles for Free Access.

 The economics of scholarly journal publishing is a clear and careful analysis by the Bergstroms (one an economist and one an ecologist). Most compelling are the cross-field comparisons of ecology, economics, mathematics, atmospheric science, neurobiology and physics – achieved through cumulative plots of citations versus cost.

  In January 2005 The Public Library of Science announced a program of institutional membership similar to BioMed Central. Institutions pay an annual “Member Fee” which can be from $2,000 to $100,000, and in return corresponding authors in their institution are entitled to a discount on PLoS publication charges of from 10% to 75%.

  The Information Access Alliance, a coalition of six leading library organizations in North America has launched a web site containing information on the impact of publisher mergers on the market for STM journals. There are links to a White Paper on the topic.

 A full frontal attack on the high cost of some scientific journal subscriptions with a list of the top 100 'culprits' and an advocacy kit for librarians and faculty.

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