A comparison of subscription and open access journals in construction management and related fields

The Internet has profoundly changed the technical infrastructure for the publishing of scientific peer reviewed journals. The traditional business model of selling the content to subscribers is increasingly being challenged by Open Access journals, which are either run at low cost by voluntary academics or which sell dissemination services to authors. In addition authors in many fields are taking advantage of the legal possibilities of uploading free manuscript versions to institutional or subject-based repositories, in order to increase readership and impact. Construction Management is lagging behind many other fields in utilising the potential of the web for efficient dissemination results, in particular to academics outside the leading universities in industrialised countries. This study looks closer at the current publishing situation in construction management and related fields and compares empirical data about 16 OA journals and 16 traditional subscription journals. Of the articles published in 2011 in the subscription journals only 9 % could be found as OA copies. The overall OA availability (including article in OA journals) was 14 % for Construction Management and Economics and 29 for construction IT scholarship

The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles – a failed experiment?

Mainstream scholarly publishers have since 2004 started to offer authors in subscription journals the possibility to free their individual articles from access barriers against a payment (hybrid OA). This has been marketed as a possible gradual transition path between subscription and open access to the scholarly journal literature, and the publishers have pledged to decrease their subscription prices in proportion to the uptake of the hybrid option. The number of hybrid journals has doubled in the past couple of years and is now over 4,300, and the number of such articles was around 12,000 in 2011. On average only 1-2 % of eligible authors utilize the OA option, due mainly to the generally high price level of typically 3,000 USD. There are, however, a few publishers and individual journals with a much higher uptake. This article takes a closer look at the development of hybrid OA and discusses, from an author-centric viewpoint, the possible reasons for the lack of success of this business model.nonPeerReviewe

Fuzzy linear programs with optimal tolerance levels

It is usually supposed that tolerance levels are determined by the decision maker a priori in a fuzzy linear program (FLP). In this paper we shall suppose that the decision maker does not care about the particular values of tolerance levels, but he wishes to minimize their weighted sum. This is a new statement of FLP, because here the tolerance levels are also treated as variables

Open Access–Are the Barriers to Change Receding?

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Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

Background In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of Open Access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk. Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact and quality of Open Access with subscription journals controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and for OA publishers their business model. Methods Two-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model. Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich’s periodicals directory. Comparisons were done on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal. Six hundred and ten OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data. Results Overall average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals which had been launched prior to 1996. OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average more cited than other OA journals. In Medicine and health OA journals founded in the last ten years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period. Conclusions Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges

Anatomy of open access publishing - a study of longitudinal development and internal structure

Background: Open access (OA) is a revolutionary way of providing access to the scholarly journal literature made possible by the Internet. The primary aim of this study was to measure the volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals from 2000 to 2011, while observing longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of OA publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types and relative distribution among scientific disciplines. The secondary aim was to measure the share of OA articles of all journal articles, including articles made OA by publishers with a delay and individual author-paid OA articles in subscription journals (hybrid OA), as these subsets of OA publishing have mostly been ignored in previous studies. Methods: Stratified random sampling of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (n = 787) was performed. The annual publication volumes spanning 2000 to 2011 were retrieved from major publication indexes and through manual data collection. Results: An estimated 340,000 articles were published by 7,117 full immediate OA journals during 2011. OA journals requiring article-processing charges have become increasingly common, publishing 166,700 articles in 2011 (49% of all OA articles). This growth is related to the growth of commercial publishers, who, despite only a marginal presence a decade ago, have grown to become key actors on the OA scene, responsible for 120,000 of the articles published in 2011. Publication volume has grown within all major scientific disciplines, however, biomedicine has seen a particularly rapid 16-fold growth between 2000 (7,400 articles) and 2011 (120,900 articles). Over the past decade, OA journal publishing has steadily increased its relative share of all scholarly journal articles by about 1% annually. Approximately 17% of the 1.66 million articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers, most articles immediately (12%) but some within 12 months of publication (5%). Conclusions: OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, having rapidly grown in relative annual share of published journal articles during the last decade.peerReviewe

How research funders can finance APCs in full OA and hybrid journals

Open access (OA) publishing is steadily growing in both full OA journals and hybrid journals where authors can pay to individually open up their articles. Funding for article processing charges (APCs) is still a strong barrier for many authors particularly for subscription journals where the hybrid option is expensive and an added extra feature after an article is accepted for publication. Many research funders in Europe have started or are considering mechanisms for paying APCs with earmarked funding in order to increase the uptake of OA. At the same time they are well aware that their actions may influence the way the OA market will develop in the near future. This article discusses a number of scenarios for ways in which funders could cover the cost of APCs, while encouraging the development of a competitive and transparent market for APC-funded OA scholarly publishing. We provide evidence that the current APC-funded full OA market is sensitive to journal prestige/impact. We present a value-based cap funding scheme which could help maintain transparency bringing hybrid market pricing in line with the full OA market. We also consider a scenario that addresses hybrid “double dipping” while limiting the cost of transitioning to full OA for research-intensive universities as well as cost-sharing as a mechanism for providing authors with an incentive for considering cost as well as value in choosing where to publish.nonPeerReviewe

The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals

Publishing in scholarly peer reviewed journals usually entails long delays from submission to publication. In part this is due to the length of the peer review process and in part because of the dominating tradition of publication in issues, earlier a necessity of paper-based publishing, which creates backlogs of manuscripts waiting in line. The delays slow the dissemination of scholarship and can provide a significant burden on the academic careers of authors. Using a stratified random sample we studied average publishing delays in 2700 papers published in 135 journals sampled from the Scopus citation index. The shortest overall delays occur in science technology and medical (STM) fields and the longest in social science, arts/humanities and business/economics. Business/economics with a delay of 18 months took twice as long as chemistry with a 9 month average delay. Analysis of the variance indicated that by far the largest amount of variance in the time between submission and acceptance was among articles within a journal as compared with journals, disciplines or the size of the journal. For the time between acceptance and publication most of the variation in delay can be accounted for by differences between specific journals

A study of Open Access Journals using article processing charges

Article Processing Charges (APC) are a central mechanism for funding Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing. We studied the APCs charged and article volumes of journals that were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as charging APCs. These included 1,405 journals that published an estimated 103,000 articles in 2010. The average charge was 582 USD (calculated over journals) and 887 US Dollars (USD) (calculated over articles). The price range varied between 20 and 3,800 USD, with the lowest prices charged by journals published in developing countries and the highest by journals with high impact factors from major international publishers. Journals in Biomedicine represent 59% of the sample and 58% of the total article volume. They also had the highest APCs of any discipline. Commercial journals had substantially higher APCs than society journals with an average APC of $1,119. These price estimates are lower than previous studies of OA publishing and much lower than is generally charged by subscription publishers making individual articles open access in what are termed hybrid journals