0.7 Subscription options and pricing  (Page 8/10)

Although definitions of open access differ in relatively minor ways, an early definition promulgated by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) remains prevalent. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), promulgated February 14, 2002, aims to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. The BOAI arises from a meeting convened in Budapest in December 2001 by the Open Society Institute (OSI). For the full text of the initiative, see: (External Link) . For an overview of other definitions of open access, see (External Link) . The BOAI defines open access to scientific and scholarly literature to be:

... its free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of (peer reviewed or pre-print) articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited…. See: (External Link) .

It should be emphasized that open access is an access principle, not a business model. While the subscription pricing models described above are based on fees paid by readers—or their proxies, such as academic libraries—open-access publishing uses alternative funding models to make research content available free to the end user. The challenges of implementing a business model capable of supporting open-access distribution are exaggerated by some and minimized by others. In reality, implementing such business models is neither easy nor impossible.

In any event, issues relating to open access are becoming increasingly prevalent in the market environment for scholarly and scientific journals, Rowlands and Nicholas (2006), 43-44, reports on the speed with which awareness of open access is increasing. and these changes can affect a society in a variety of ways. These include:

• The need to accommodate member demand for open access by implementing publishing models capable of supporting it; On author attitudes towards open access, see Rowlands and Nicholas (2006), 43-46; Rowlands, Nicholas, and Huntingdon (2004), 21ff; and Brown and Swan (2004).
• Funder policies that require authors to make electronic versions of their articles available in digital depositories, typically after an embargo period intended to protect the publisher of the journal in which the article originally appeared; and
• Institutional mandates that require a faculty member to deposit an article in an institution’s online repository.

A full discussion of the opportunities and challenges of open access lie beyond the scope of this guide, For an introduction to open access, see Peter Suber’s “Open Access Overview” at (External Link) . and guides to planning and implementing open-access business models are available. See Crow and Goldstein (2004), Velterop (2005), and Solomon (2008). However, we will briefly review the issues above as they may affect any society publisher.