Is it true that Open Access will inevitably harm scholarly societies?
Answer
No. It is inevitable that all publishers will need to adjust existing economic models to meet the realities of, and fully realize the capabilities of, internet access. All members of the scholarly community – authors, readers, publishers, librarians, and academic administrators – will need to collaborate to build the best models for scholarly publishing and access in the digital age. The best new models are likely to require significant change from all the players; the existing controlled-access journal subscription model, particularly in cases where the journals are high-priced, may not serve the community as well as it has in the past. New economic models need to be developed and tested, a process that is already underway.
None of this means that scholarly societies, many of which depend on revenue from their publication programs, will necessarily be jeopardized by transitioning to these new economic models. As Clifford Lynch, the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, has recently said about journals published by scholarly societies: “their journals typically are viewed as offering high quality at reasonable cost, and there’s no reason that they shouldn’t continue to be highly competitive if one moves away from a reader-pays model.”
Resources exist to assist publishers who want to try open access models. See for example the Open Society Institute’s Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-based Journal to Open Access.
Attribution: This FAQ is reused from Vanderbilt University Library's Open Access: Open Access Myths page (accessed Mar 2023) thanks to a Creative Commons license.
This FAQ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.