OPEN ARCHIVES INITIATIVE - Market revolution or hot air?

The Scholarly Communication Chain

• The current scholarly journals market is felt to be unfair and outdated by many academics and librarians.
• Universities feel that journal subscriptions have become too high as a result of double figure annual price increases during the 1990s. They also point to the time delay involved in seeing research published in journals and the increasing need to see research findings alongside supporting content such as notes, databases and videos. Librarians, in particular, are also concerned with the issue of digital archiving.
• Publishers argue that alternative financial models for this market are not necessarily as appealing as they may at first appear. They also point towards their experience of e-publishing, management of the peer review process, and key marketing role.

Open Archives Developments

• This section looks at pre-print and post-print archives, institutional and disciplinary archives, and the technical background to the open archives movement, as well as providing a timeline of developments in this area since 1990.

Project SHERPA

• Project SHERPA is a three-year project led by CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) and hosted by Nottingham University, which aims to investigate the feasibility of an institutional open archives repository. Five universities are participating, as well as the British Library.
• The case study in this report is based around an interview with the project director and looks in detail at the aims of the project, challenges encountered so far and the likely findings.

The Debate

• By means of interviews, this section looks at the opinions of an academic who has played a key role in the open archives debate, a leading university librarian and a journals publisher.

Where is this movement heading? Three Scenarios

• A two-tier system could emerge, with certain disciplines shifting to open archives as the focus of scholarly communication, but with journals still dominating in most disciplines.
• Institutions could lead a shift away from a journal subscriptions-based model to an ?author pays? model, forcing publishers to shift their business and find new roles for journal titles.
• Institutions and disciplinary ?enthusiasts? could decide to outsource the development and management of open archives. Major commercial publishers, technology players with experience in this area, university presses and infomediaries might be well-placed to fill this role.