On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Katherine Porter wrote: > This prevents an interesting opportunity to see how important free > access is to the status of a journal. The IOP press release speaks > in glowing terms of JHEP's importance, it's 6.6 impact factor > attained in just 1 year. I wonder if this would be true had it cost > $900 from issue 1. I wonder what the impact will be in 2004 or > 2005 when it is no longer free.
Yes, offering toll-free-access for a start-up, to gather visibility and impact, and then later phasing in toll-based access might be a good journal launching strategy, but that certainly was not the case with JHEP! JHEP (and its immediate, massive impact factor) was virtually a creation of the success and growth of the toll-free-access Physics Archive http://www.arxiv.org , which began and is best represented in the HEP area http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/areas/ And JHEP definitely was not founded with the intention or expectation that its own growth and success would force it to resort to toll-based cost-recovery! (JHEP's spectacular success and impact was also in no small owed to the immediate fealty of authors such as Ed Witten: enter "witten" into http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search to see the gravitas that came with his contributions.) But the ultimate irony is this: Virtually 100% of the papers appearing in JHEP are also self-archived by their authors in http://www.arxiv.org So even now that access to JHEP will become toll-based, the free versions will remain accessible through Arxiv! So what this transition to toll-based access to JHEP may really be testing (and no one knows in advance what will be the outcome of this test!) is how much of a market for toll-based access can be sustained even when there is toll-free access to the self-archived versions through Eprint Archives? http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm If it turns out that the essential costs of peer review can be covered from the toll-based revenues even when free-access versions are available too, then this is a sustainable co-existence model, and a strong and positive harbinger for the success of generalized self-archiving, for all 20,000+ peer-reviewed journals, across disciplines and around the world. But do not forget that JHEP had already done the requisite downsizing to the bare essentials in advance, in virtue of its online-only, toll-free-access launch. The other 20,000 may still have to do some slimming down if they are to co-exist successfully with their self-archived toll-free counterparts. On the other hand, if they do not raise price excessively, it may be the journal's value-added enhancements that sustain the demand for the toll-based version! "The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html "Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html So it will be interesting to see which way things go. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html You may join the list at the amsci site. Discussion can be posted to: [email protected]
