Controversial Issues in the Context of Open Access

Open Acces

Income sources as underlying business models’ attributes for scholarly journals: preliminary findings from analysing open access journals data

The Study for Open Access Publishing (SOAP) project is one of the initiatives undertaken to explore the risks and opportunities of the transition to open access publishing. Some of the early analyses of open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) show that more than half of the open access publishing initiatives (56%) were undertaken by smaller publishers associated with a small number of journals. The study differentiates between 14 large publishers and other publishers. The 14 large publishers publish more than 50 journals each or 1000 per year (data as per 2007 or 2008). Regarding income sources as means for sustaining a journal’s functions, “article processing charges", "membership fee" and "advertisement" are the predominant options for the large publishers (publishers associated with more than 50 journals or 1000 articles); "subscription to the print version of the journal", "sponsorship" and somewhat less the "article processing charges" have the highest incidences for all other publisher