Stanford, November 29, 2004
Free eJournal Archive Passes the 3/4 Million Mark
While government agencies, academics, and publishers debate over whether or not publicly funded research results should be freely available, Stanford University’s HighWire Press has been doing its part in taking responsibility for the Open Archive. Participating HighWire-hosted publishers have been steadily growing the world’s largest collection of open access, high-impact scholarly research online. Today, more than 780,000 free peer-reviewed, full-text articles are available at www.highwire.org . This open archive covers a wide range of not-for-profit titles, with twice as much content as the current, NIH-funded repository, PubMed Central¹. Over 90% of the articles in the government repository are already available for free in their complete context (the entire online journal, not just individual articles), with advanced full-text searching and toll-free reference linking, through HighWire.
"There has been a great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding about the chimera of ’free’ access, mainly due to a failure to differentiate between responsible and rapacious publishers," stated Michael A. Keller, Stanford University librarian and publisher of HighWire Press. "Not-for-profit and society publishers, among them those associated with HighWire, offer break-even pricing models that equitably advance both the publishing and the research processes. The combination of these publishers’ fair pricing policies and their voluntary opening of access to over three quarters of a million articles, clearly demonstrates their earnest desire to fully support the scientific and scholarly communication process." Keller noted that many of the HighWire-hosted publishers are signatories of the DC Principles², further affirming their commitment to providing wide distribution of published research findings to scientists worldwide.
Through the HighWire free back issues program³, participating journals make all their research content free after a brief delay. Currently, 50 journals on HighWire offer content free within six months or less from the day of publication, another 161 titles after a wait of twelve months or more, and all offer immediate access for members, subscribers or those on an authorized institutional network. "The free back issues model allows high-impact journals to remain viable as respected titles of record," HighWire director John Sack explains. "Being able to count on multiple income sources (membership, journal subscriptions, page charges, author fees, etc.) to help fund the costs of publishing, these societies can continue to contribute to the public good by making ever higher numbers of peer reviewed articles available online to researchers and practitioners who do not have the benefit of subscription access." The pace of adding free articles is rapidly increasing, and HighWire expects to cross the one million mark during the year 2005.
"As the flagship journal of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS strongly supports the HighWire free back issues program," says Proceedings’ Editor-in-Chief, Nicholas R. Cozzarelli. "All PNAS papers dating back to 1990 are free at HighWire Press after six months. Additional back content, beginning with volume 1 in 1915, will soon be freely available, plus PNAS content is free immediately to more than 140 developing countries." Several HighWire-hosted journals, including PNAS, the Company of Biologists’ Development, Oxford University Press’ Nucleic Acids Research, and the American Physiological Society’s Physiological Genomics, are experimenting with optional "author pays" publishing models, for those who wish to have their papers available for free immediately upon publication, by choosing to pay an open access fee.
Part of the reason for the recent expansion of free articles available on HighWire is due to a series of retrospective conversion projects underway at several high-profile society and not-for-profit journals. Rockefeller University Press (RUP) made the decision to mount the entire archives for all three of their journals online at no charge to readers. The Journal of Experimental Medicine, for example, can now be read for free as far back as its first issue, from 1896. "The yearlong project cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we felt that if we could do it, we owed it to the community to make it free," says Michael Held, Executive Director of the RUP. " We’re not out to make a profit, and we don’t have to raise money for society purposes, so it just felt wrong to charge for reading the back content. We made a decision to allow free access to all journal content more than six months old, and this free archive seems consistent with that decision."
When asked why the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) decided to digitize and release all 100 years of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) content on HighWire at no charge, Deputy Editor of the JBC, Robert D. Simoni, said, "There was never any consideration of charging for the back issues. Since 1998, we have been an originator of the HighWire Free Back Issues model. This was just an extension of that early policy and consistent with ASBMB’s mission of service." Dr. Simoni added, "I had the occasion to go back to the early issues for some JBC history in preparation for our centennial celebration in 2005 and found many of the bound volumes in poor physical condition. Thus the scanning project took on an element of preservation as well."