By Bo-Christer Björk, PhD
Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
Corresponding Author:
Bo-Christer Björk, PhD
Hanken School of Economics
P.O. Box 479
Helsinki, 00101
Finland
Phone: 358 50 3553425
Fax: 358 9 43133275
Email: Bo-Christer.Bjork [at] hanken.fi
ABSTRACT
Background: The emergence of the Internet has triggered tremendous
changes in the publication of scientific peer-reviewed journals. Today,
journals are usually available in parallel electronic versions, but the way
the peer-review process works, the look of articles and journals, and the
rigid and slow publication schedules have remained largely unchanged,
at least for the vast majority of subscription-based journals. Those
publishing firms and scholarly publishers who have chosen the more
radical option of open access (OA), in which the content of journals is
freely accessible to anybody with Internet connectivity, have had a much
bigger degree of freedom to experiment with innovations.
Objective: The objective was to study how open access journals have
experimented with innovations concerning ways of organizing the peer
review, the format of journals and articles, new interactive and media
formats, and novel publishing revenue models.
Methods: The features of 24 open access journals were studied. The
journals were chosen in a nonrandom manner from the approximately
7000 existing OA journals based on available information about
interesting journals and include both representative cases and highly
innovative outlier cases.
Results: Most early OA journals in the 1990s were founded by individual
scholars and used a business model based on voluntary work close in
spirit to open-source development of software. In the next wave, many
long-established journals, in particular society journals and journals
from regions such as Latin America, made their articles OA when they
started publishing parallel electronic versions. From about 2002 on,
newly founded professional OA publishing firms using article-
processing charges to fund their operations have emerged. Over the
years, there have been several experiments with new forms of peer
review, media enhancements, and the inclusion of structured data
sets with articles. In recent years, the growth of OA publishing has
also been facilitated by the availability of open-source software for
journal publishing.
Conclusions: The case studies illustrate how a new technology and
a business model enabled by new technology can be harnessed to
find new innovative ways for the organization and content of scholarly
publishing. Several recent launches of OA journals by major
subscription publishers demonstrate that OA is rapidly gaining
acceptance as a sustainable alternative to subscription-based
scholarly publishing.
(J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e115)
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