Open Access
Dieser Artikel in Deutsch
Instead of being published in expensive specialist journals, research results are to be available to everyone free-of-charge in the Internet. This is what the Open Access Campaign is calling for, a movement enjoying the support of numerous higher education and research institutions world-wide. In Germany, the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer Society, the Helmholtz Association, the Leibniz Association, the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (the German Rectors' Conference) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) subscribed to the principle of open access in their Berlin Declaration of 2003. The German Open Access initiatives include the German Academic Publishers (GAP), who are to launch their campaign in September 2005.
A subscription or, better perhaps, a small car? In view of prices rocketing sky-high on the specialist journal market, such considerations aren't really as bizarre as they may sound. On their homepages, disgruntled university library staff are illustrating the costs of journals with country houses, cruises or vehicles corresponding to the price of an annual subscription. For example, the University of Maryland, USA, states that it pays 14,000 dollars for "The Journal of Comparative Neurology", while Florida Atlantic University invests an annual 128,000 dollars to gain access to "Early English Books Online" (a digitalised collection of historic publications in English) and the University of Constance presents a hit list on its website of the ten most expensive journals, headed by the "Chemical Physics Letters", at 11,346 euros a year. Price hikes over the last few years may be anything from 54 to 151 percent. Since budgets can no longer keep pace with such expenses, higher education institutions and research organisations are now responding by cancelling subscriptions. This in turn results in diminished supplies for academics. The cause of the so-called "Serial Crisis" is held to be monopolistic pricing policies pursued by a handful of major publishers such as Elsevier,Wiley or Springer.
Against this background, the Open Access Campaign is becoming increasingly popular. The Directory of Open Access Journals now comprises 1,594 electronic journals. However, one of the chief problems of free-ofcharge publications is their funding. An editorial and organisational effort is required to ensure that the quality of contributions matches that of the commercial publications and will stand up to a peer review. Now that this is not being funded via the readers, the various financing models put forward by Open Access suggest that costs be borne by the authors. A certain charge is worked out per article for the academic or his institution; thus the US American Public Library of Science (PLoS) charges authors 1,500 dollars a publication in the areas of biology and medicine. BioMed Central, a London publishing firm with a portfolio of more than 100 journals, covers part of its costs with members' fees, while non-members pay between 450 and 1,235 euros per contribution.
Critics of Open Access stress that this amounts to transferring the costs of publishing from the private sector to the state, while its proponents argue that the tax-payer has a right to free access to the research results he has been funding. A number of Open Access projects are currently being promoted in Germany, too. They include Digital Peer Publishing (DIPP), a project of the Federal Land of North Rhine-Westphalia to support e-journals, eSciDoc, a platform to facilitate networking of academic activities that is being developed by the Max Planck Society in collaboration with Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe, as well as German Academic Publishers. GAP is being funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft with the aim of creating a platform for Open Access publications in all subject areas. "We intend to establish a collaborative network consisting of the publishing centres of higher education and other research institutions," Dr. Stefan Gradman, GAP Project Head, explains. "Primary costs are to be covered by members' fees of about 100 to 200 euros a year. In addition, our Back Office is going to provide a number of services ranging from editing to printing and distribution that we will charge extra.What is important is that the portal is not understood merely as a federation of institutional 'Document Repositories' with contents that have not been checked but that only contributions that have undergone a quality review are adopted. This, in turn, is up to the member institutions." The founder members include the Universities of Hamburg, Oldenburg, Karlsruhe, Göttingen and the Free University of Berlin. The network is to commence operations in autumn 2005.
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