Ultimately you might be right. But I see OA as a process to get open access to our research results. It is even not clear what OA means in itself, nor whether the way to it has to follow a certain path, beyond producing results or content that is literally free, unrestricted and open access to the content of the article (in the sense and standards of scientific publishing). What I hope though is that the business models will be sustainable enough, and a particular kind of OA is not done with a malicious intention (like Ford who the LA tramways system only to shut it down to sell their cars instead).
What's more important is the commitment of the MfN to continue publish, and publish in OA. That means there will be enough financial resources to maintain their inhouse journals, send a signal to other similar institutions to follow suit (which they want to do not because of the journals but because the results are instantaneously distributed to Encyclopedia of Life, Species-ID, Plazi, GBIF, institutions that multiply the distribution effects). Another aspect is the commitment of Pensoft to innovate, to develop new ways of publishing scientific results, like the most recent creation of the Biodiversity Data Journal. http://biodiversitydatajournal.com/articles.php?id=995 Even though the profit margin of Pensoft is not public, the prices to publish are and they are well below what Elsevier and others ask for a technically inferior product. Despite not being Cell or another high profile journal, >43,000 visits for an article about spiders shows a potential impact (http://tinyurl.com/pnozq7p ) , though not resulting necessarily in high impact factors. Taxonomy is notorious for having low impact factors, but very long shelf life of their publications - where else are publications from 1758 regularly cited?! I also think that publishing in taxonomy is different than the SMT publishers that make the big buck. Traditionally, we have an estimated 2000 journals where the discovery of new species is recorded, some of them are very small covering one taxon, are published in one of the big and not so big natural history museums, not even primarily to sell but to exchange with other museums. For all of us it is only an advantage if we have a publisher that is willing to tackle this market. It is the only way we finally might be able what is running and flying around out there. Interestingly enough it is Pensoft that pioneered together with Plazi (my institution) and NLM the development of TaxPub JATS, the first domain specific flavor of NLM's JATS used to archive biomedical journals at PubMed Central - taxonomists have been the first for once in the life sciences and medical world. We have discussions with Pensoft about open source etc., but what for us counts more is the trust in Pensoft to work for the distribution of scientific results to the best of the scientist, and actually do deliver: the results are their increasing number of journals, a robust publishing environment, helping solving longstanding issues in our domain, like identifiers for scientific names, treatments etc, and actually deploy them in their journals. This is the only way to get over what seemed until very recently un insurmountable barrier. Sorry for providing neither a black and white, no or yes answer All the best Donat -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von Richard Poynder Gesendet: Friday, December 20, 2013 3:35 PM An: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Betreff: [GOAL] Re: new platinum open access Thanks for posting this Donat, I am curious as to how much the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin is paying Pensoft to publish these journals, and I would think others on the list might be too. Unfortunately, when I asked Pensoft for the information I was told that it was confidential. Since the data would help other journals/organisations looking to pursue the so-called "platinum road" it seems a shame. Would you agree? Richard Poynder -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Donat Agosti Sent: 19 December 2013 09:35 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] new platinum open access Below a success story for our (taxonomists) goal to not only provide open access but also create semantically enhanced journals based on Taxpub JATS. In this case two old prestigious journals are now published this way. Donat http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-12/pp-tot121813.php 2 of the oldest German journals in Zoology go for 'platinum' open access Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Zoosystematics and Evolution join the family of Pensoft journals Enough has been written and said about "platinum" open access as a step beyond the "green" and "gold" open access models. However, comparatively little has been seen of its practical implementation. On 1 January 2014, two of the oldest German journals in Zoology - Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Zoosystematics and Evolution - make a step right into the future by joining the journal publishing platform of Pensoft Publishers and adopting "platinum" open access For Pensoft, "platinum" open access means not just that the articles and all associated materials are free to download and that there are no author-side fees but even more so that novel approaches are used in the dissemination and reuse of published content. This publishing model includes: Free to read, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute Easy to discover and harvest by both humans and computers Content automatically harvested by aggregators Data and narrative integrated to the widest extent possible Community peer-review and rapid publication Easy and efficient communication with authors and reviewers No author-side fees Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Zoosystematics and Evolution are titles of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift, founded in 1857 as Berliner Entomologische Zeitschrift, is one of the oldest entomological journals worldwide, and the oldest one in Germany. It publishes original research papers in English on the systematics, taxonomy, phylogeny, comparative morphology, and biogeography of insects. Having long been indexed by Thomson Reuters's Web of Science, now the journal will go on the route of innovation with Pensoft. Zoosystematics and Evolution, formerly Mitteilungen aus dem Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Zoologische Reihe - is an international, peer-reviewed life science journal devoted to whole-organism biology, that also has a rich history behind itself (established in 1898). It publishes original research and review articles in the field of zoosystematics, evolution, morphology, development and biogeography at all taxonomic levels. _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
