Exploring the effects of a transition to open access: Insights from a simulation study

Abstract

The Open Access (OA) movement, which postulates gratis and unrestricted online access to publicly funded research findings, has significantly gained momentum in recent years. The two ways of achieving OA are self‐archiving of scientific work by the authors (Green OA) and publishing in OA journals (Gold OA). But there is still no consensus which model should be supported in particular. The aim of this simulation study is to discover mechanisms and predict developments that may lead to specific outcomes of possible market transformation scenarios. It contributes to theories related to OA by substantiating the argument of a citation advantage of OA articles and by visualizing the mechanisms of a journal system collapsing in the long‐term due to the continuation of the serials crisis. The practical contribution of this research stems from the integration of all market players: Decisions regarding potential financial support of OA models can be aligned with our findings, as well as the decision of a publisher to migrate his/her journals to Gold OA. Our results indicate that for scholarly communication in general, a transition to Green OA combined with a certain level of subscription‐based publishing and a migration of few top journals is the most beneficial development.

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

“…These embargoes are applied in order to avoid putative reductions in subscription income due to such self-archiving." However, empirical evidence fails to support this 'obvious' claim, and we refer you to Berners-Lee et al, 2005;Swan, 2005;Henneken et al, 2007, Houghton et al, 2010, Bernius et al, 2013, and the Committee ), which all indicate that not only is there no loss of subscription for Economic Development, 2012 income from green open access, but that both can indeed coexist as a sustainable business model for publishers. Furthermore, there is little evidence to support the commonly held inference that shorter or zero-length embargoes will have a detrimental effect on publisher incomes (BIS Select ; but see also Jubb, 2011).…”

“…Some publishers require an embargo period before deposition in public repositories is allowed. These embargoes are applied in order to avoid putative reductions in subscription income due to such self-archiving, although there is little evidence to support the existence of such embargoes (Berners-Lee et al, 2005;Bernius et al, 2013;Houghton & Oppenheim, 2010;Henneken et al, 2006;Swan & Brown, 2005). The Green route is also enabled through author rights retention, in which authors pre-emptively grant non-exclusive rights to their institutions before publishing any works.…”

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

“…These embargoes are applied in order to avoid putative reductions in subscription income due to such self-archiving." However, empirical evidence fails to support this 'obvious' claim, and we refer you to Berners-Lee et al, 2005;Swan, 2005;Henneken et al, 2007, Houghton et al, 2010, Bernius et al, 2013, which all indicate that not only is there no loss of subscription for Economic Development, 2012 income from green open access, but that both can indeed coexist as a sustainable business model for publishers. Furthermore, there is little evidence to support the commonly held inference that shorter or zero-length embargoes will have a detrimental effect on publisher incomes (BIS Select ; but see also Jubb, 2011).…”

Educating future professionals in conservation science: The challenges of an interdisciplinary field

“…As open access journals become more established and the benefits of delayed open access publications ( papers of subscription-based journals which become open access by the publisher after a predefined period of 'embargo' time) are better understood (Laakso & Björk, 2013), such obstacles to the dissemination of new information should diminish. In particular, research carried out to understand better the benefits of open access has highlighted a number of advantages to publishers, which in addition to the more obvious, also include an increase in citations and accordingly an increase in the journal impact factor (see Bernius et al, 2013).…”