by Byron Russell, Head of Ingenta Connect
Ingenta
Publisher Bulletin, Spring 2016
Open Access (OA) is very much the disruptive new kid on the academic publishing block. It has been nurtured on the emergence of web-based tools that make digital publishing and archiving easier than ever before. But where is all this content to be found?
Demand from scholarly (especially scientific) researchers to have their work published as OA has been rising steadily over the past five years. Taking into account the imposition of moving-wall timeframes of up to 24 months, an estimated 43% of academic content published in the UK is now Open Access. According to work by Research Consulting, fully two thirds of the world’s journals now offer an OA option, though many publishers follow a hybrid rather than fully OA model.
With this rapid insurgence of OA, researchers are now being faced with a tsunami of academic content that is free to download, share and even adapt. The problem is that the actual content is in so many different repositories that discoverability is a real issue – to outline just some of the issues, see Byron Russell’s blog on Open Access and discoverability.
We’re now starting work on a new project at Ingenta that will eventually lead to the creation of a new, purely and exclusively Open Access site. This will provide an added service for existing clients with OA content and new OA publishers looking for a truly economical hosting solution. As our clients, we’ll keep you fully informed and involved. Ask your Account Manager or watch out for a news mailing later this year
