Publisher / editor

What is your role?

Authors are no longer dependent on publishers when it comes to publication. And yet authors like working with publishers, who take the work off their hands and organise quality control. Different people and organisations prefer publication in open access journals (the golden road to open access) to self-archiving in repositories (the green road to open access).

Authors can select from a wide range of publishers. They can choose one of the new publishers specialising in open access, or a major traditional publisher that has joined the open access bandwagon and now publishes open access journals alongside their existing subscription-based journals. Some large traditional publishers also offer the hybrid open access model, in which authors pay a fee to publish open access articles in subscription-based journals. Dutch universities view this option as a temporary solution and expect all publishers to make the transition to a purely golden business model for all their journals.

Many authors are on the editorial board of academic journals. Some of these editors decide to publish the journal themselves, assisted by the open access initiatives of university libraries.

What can you do as a publisher/editor?

• Explore open access business models, such as the JISC and Open Society Institute models.

• For subscription journals: make articles openly accessible to everyone after a six-month period.

• For monographs: decide after what period of time the text should be made openly available. Make scanned versions of older monographs available in open access.