Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Pay It Forward project set out to determine the potential financial implications of a move to an all-open access (OA) world of journal publishing. The Scholarly Kitchen brought this interesting information to our attention in their article, “The Pay It Forward Project: Confirming What We Already Knew About Open Access.”
A great deal of effort, including focus groups, author/reader surveys, publisher surveys and data collection and analysis from libraries and publishers went into the findings that essentially confirmed what many already knew — moving to full open access means increased costs for productive research institutions.
The publisher survey did show that OA is no longer seen as an existential threat, and that publishers have embraced it as a business model where appropriate, and consider it a growth channel going forward.
Both sets of surveys further confirmed that OA is much more strongly established and understood in scientific disciplines than in humanities and the social sciences.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
