On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Kjellberg Sara http://www.doaj.org/ wrote:
Thank you for your suggestion about [adding JHEP http://jhep.sissa.it/ to the Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/ ] but we think that JHEP is no longer an open access journal? On their website it says: > "This financial support started in January 2002. JHEP has remained > freely accessible throughout this year, while, as of January 2003, > it will be made available on a very reasonable subscription basis, > managed by IoPP. JHEP will thus no longer be free of charge, as > in the first pioneering years but an exception will be made for > developing and low income countries. Since the journal is not > cost-free users libraries will now be asked to contribute in a > fair and distributed fashion by paying annual fee for the new JHEP > archive. The archive from 1997 to 2001 will remain freely available to > the community." [http://jhep.sissa.it/IoPP_SISSA2.html] > > Do you have any other information regarding their present solution? I > think it is sad that a journal, that have been free for so long, choose > this way to continue. I'm afraid I know no more. You are right: JHEP cannot be listed as an open-access journal. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1812.html http://jhep.cern.ch/JOURNAL/IoPP_SISSA2.html My interpretation is the following: This is a sign that Open Access Publishing may be premature. JHEP used to be an open-access journal -- and one of the most important, fast-growing, and highest-impact open-access journals. But then it found it could no longer make ends meet and became a toll-access journal. What I would recommend to JHEP is that phsyicists join forces with the biologists' Bethesda Statement http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2877.html and the Wellcome Trust Statement http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3030.html which both propose funding to cover the costs of open-access research publication. NSF should be urged to do the same for Physics research, and then maybe JHEP will become able afford to become open-access again. (It had relied on subsidy rather than publication charges in its previous open-access incarnation.) But the situation with JHEP is brighter than it seems: Although JHEP is no longer open-access, it is nevertheless "green", i.e. it supports author self-archiving: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm And not ot not only does JHEP support self-archiving, but its contents, high-energy physics, are the ones that are by far the most advanced in self-archiving -- so much so that the HEP sector of the Physics ArXiv is virtually complete. That means that every HEP article (including all those in JHEP) *is* openly accessible, because they have all been self-archived. This demonstrates, yet again, that one can have open-access even without open-access publishing. It also demonstrates that open access can co-exist with toll-access: Far from preventing JHEP from converting to toll-access, the fact that all the self-archived open-access versions of its full-text contents were freely available online probably helped it both to achieve its prominence and to find a willing toll-access publisher in IOP when it needed them to make ends meet. I think this is still just a local phenomenon, though; we have to be cautious about whether it will scale: It is unlikely that 100% open-access for the entire refereed research literature (all 24,000 journals worth, across all fields) will co-exist indefinitely with toll-access as the means of cost-recovery. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1 But the important lesson is that *it does not matter* now! All researchers who want open-access for their work can have it, now, without having to worry or wait. It does not depend on transitions in journals' cost-recovery models. It depends only on what the research community elects to do for itself! Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: [email protected] it, bia self-archiving
