[eIFLoa] 2 posts about Open Access publishing

[Iryna Kuchma]

1.
For Free or for Fee? Dilemma of Small Scientific Journals
Marko Kljaković-Gašpić, Jelka Petrak, Igor Rudan, and Zrinka Biloglav
Croatian Medical Journal, 2007 June; 48(3): 292–299.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2080546

Biomedical publishing is becoming increasingly dominated by multinational
companies, advertising research articles at the international market,
presenting them electronically through web-based services, and distributing
them to readers-consumers. It seems that they will soon become the sole
publishers for the majority of biomedical journals. In the past decade,
however, we witnessed a quiet revolution in the whole structure of
scientific communication, influenced by new technologies and initiatives
such as Open Access, PubMedCentral, PLoS, and BioMedCentral.

The Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ, http://www.cmj.hr/) has recently been
approached by two major publishing companies and offered to become one of
the journals in their cluster. The five benefits offered to the journal were
the following: increasing the journal's international market presence;
working with the editors-in-chief and publisher's academic relations on the
improvement of the impact factor of the journal; copyediting and typesetting
via publisher's offices; marketing for subscription and non subscription
revenue and paying royalties on the revenues received by publisher to the
present owner of the journal; and input marketing to attract papers. These
offers prompted vivid discussion among the members of the journal's
Editorial board. The comments received from many scientists related to the
journal made us realize that the decision on this matter was neither simple
nor straightforward. The editorial decision was to join neither of the
publishers. We felt that the decision had to be explained to our readers by
defining CMJ's position in global scientific and medical journal publishing.
Our experience may be similar to that of the many biomedical journals which
find themselves in a dilemma whether to join major publishers or not (to
continue reading go to
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2080546)<http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2080546>

2.
ASSAF scholarly publishing team visits SciELO in Brazil

Posted by Eve Gray on 05 August, 2008 11:29

On July 7-11, 2008, a delegation from the Academy of Sciences of South
Africa (ASSAf) visited BIREME In Sao Paulo, Brazil. The ASSAF delegation was
there to review the potential for the adoption of the SciELO (Scientific
Electronic Library Online http://www.scielo.org/index.php?lang=en) model as
a platform to manage scientific publication in South Africa. Given that
there is a wider African Academies of Science project to boost scholarly
publishing across Africa, this could be a spearhead for a future regional
open access network. (For background, see my blog of 30 April)

This was an important visit. SciELO is a model of successful regional
collaboration to raise the profile of a developing economy region's research
publication in the face of an inequitable global system. Given that Thomson
Scientific is reported to be looking at the question of regional journals
right now, it is worth looking at a bit of history. A similar exercise
happened in 1982, at which the status of 'peripheral' or 'Third World'
journals was discussed. As Jean-Claude Guèdon describes the result in a
recent publication (http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00012156/), given the
task of reviewing how to deal with a national perspective on contributions
to world science, the national perspective was 'ultimately dismissed,
presumably as a provincial exercise of no interest to the rest of the world.
Without justification or analysis, a distinction between "local
publications" and "mainstream" or "world science" as if it were evidence".

We live with the results of this perverse interpretation of scientific
universalism' as Guèdon describes it, as we all know.

BIREME has produced a detailed newsletter on this visit (
http://espacio.bvsalud.org/boletim.php?newsletter=20080728&newsLang=en&newsName=Newsletter%20VHL%20081%2028/july/2008&articleId=07112304200801)
in which Wieland Gevers is quoted on South Africa's position in this regard:


According to Wieland Gevers, among the 225 South African scientific
journals, over one hundred have never had an article cited. "South Africa
occupies a paradoxical position in the context of scientific publication: it
is simultaneously a giant within the African context and a dwarf in the
international arena", defined Gevers. He also added that "we are talking
about a country that has nine Nobel Prize winners, and four are related to
scientific fields, including Allan MacLeod Cormack ... -the co-inventor of
CAT scanning...

We watch the outcome of this initiative with great interest. SciELO could be
a powerful partner. Guèdon describes it as probably the most successful
regional/international initiative - it includes Portugal and Spain as well
as Latin American countries – which has the potential, he argues, 'to play a
formidable role in this battle to remove the divide barriers or, at least,
lower them' . He argues for 'strong international collaboration with
well-targeted countries to build a base for the reform of scientific power
in a credible way. These countries are quite easy to identify and have
already been mentioned before: they include China and India. Africa must be
included because it is suffering the most from the knowledge divide that has
been constantly decried, criticised and attacked in this text.'

More background from the BIREME newsletter:

SciELO has had a successful performance in Latin America and the Caribbean,
and is an outstanding reference in the process of research, evaluation and
adoption of a solution for national scientific communication...The first
portal - SciELO Brazil collection - started operating publicly in 1998.
Since then, the SciELO project has developed and is present in eight
countries, adding up to over 550 titles of certified journals and more than
180 thousand full-text articles available free online (open access),
including original articles, review articles, editorials and other types of
communication...

ASSAf showed interest to put into practice a pilot experience with an
initial group of five South African publications in order to test the
functionalities of the SciELO platform. The BIREME was invited to make a
technical visit to South Africa in September 2008 to demonstrate the system
to the members of the Academy Advisory Board.

http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/gray_area/2008/08/05/assaf-visits-scielo