Information Research Weblog

Euan Semple (who has his own Weblog) has drawn my attention to an interesting site - Open Access Now, which is published by BioMed Central, which is, itself, an open access publisher.

This interests me greatly, of course, since Information Research is an open access journal. Unfortunately, to date, I have been unable to get the kind of support for the journal that BioMed Central seems capable of. However, I am now in contact with SPARC - the open access initiative of the Association of Research Libraries - and hope for better things in the future.

One news item on the site also suggests changes for the better: Oxford University Press is to experiment with open access. It's top-rated Nucleic Acids Research is to become open access under an 'author funded' model. That is, authors will pay to have their papers published. Initially, the experiment will concern only one issue of the journal, its 2004 database issue, but it expects to roll out the system to cover all issues over the next four to five years.

I doubt that the author-funded model would work in our sector. There are too many journals looking for too few quality papers. However, someone pays for open access - in the case of Information Research, server space is paid for by the University of Sheffield, and all other costs, including domain name registration, are met by me.

A couple of publishers have approached me about the journal, but their heads begin to hurt when I talk about alternative models for open access and interest disappears pretty rapidly. However, if anyone out their knows of a sugar daddy who would like to support this enterprise, do let me know!

As a complete aside, I saw that Euan's Weblog has a poem as its most recent entry, so I thought - why not the IRWeblog? After all, poetry is a very concentrated way of transmitting messages about all kinds of things. For something different, however, I thought that a waka competition might be the thing. See the next entry.