1 December 2004
Free eJournal Archive Passes 3/4 Million Mark
While government agencies, academics, and publishers debate over whether or not publicly funded research results should be freely available, Stanford University’s HighWire Press has been doing its part in taking responsibility for the Open Archive.
Participating HighWire-hosted publishers have been steadily growing the world’s largest collection of open access, high-impact scholarly research online.
Today, more than 780,000 free peer-reviewed, full-text articles are available at www.highwire.org. This open archive covers a wide range of not-for-profit titles. Over 90% of the articles in the government repository are already available for free in their complete context (the entire online journal, not just individual articles), with advanced full-text searching and toll-free reference linking, through HighWire.
“There has been a great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding about the chimera of ‘free’ access, mainly due to a failure to differentiate between responsible and rapacious publishers," stated Michael A. Keller, Stanford University librarian and publisher of HighWire Press. “Not-for-profit and society publishers, among them those associated with HighWire, offer break-even pricing models that equitably advance both the publishing and the research processes. The combination of these publishers’ fair pricing policies and their voluntary opening of access to over three quarters of a million articles, clearly demonstrates their earnest desire to fully support the scientific and scholarly communication process.”
Through the HighWire free back issues program, participating journals make all their research content free after a brief delay. Currently, 50 journals on HighWire offer content free within six months or less from the day of publication, another 161 titles after a wait of twelve months or more, and all offer immediate access for members, subscribers or those on an authorized institutional network.
“The free back issues model allows high-impact journals to remain viable as respected titles of record,” HighWire director John Sack explains. “Being able to count on multiple income sources (membership, journal subscriptions, page charges, author fees, etc.) to help fund the costs of publishing, these societies can continue to contribute to the public good by making ever higher numbers of peer reviewed articles available online to researchers and practitioners who do not have the benefit of subscription access.”
The pace of adding free articles is rapidly increasing, and HighWire expects to cross the one million mark during the year 2005.
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