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• New publishing models

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1. SPARC

   SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is a group of universities, research libraries, including MSU, that formulate constructive responses to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. SPARC focuses on promoting broad and cost-effective access to peer-reviewed scholarship by developing competitive alternatives to current high-priced commercial journals and digital aggregations.

   Partnering with publishers and advisory services, SPARC develops alternatives which rely on different business models than traditional journals and promotes competition for authors and buyers. SPARC also encourages fundamental changes in the system and the culture of scholarly communication through campaigns aimed at enhancing awareness of scholarly communication issues and support of expanded institutional and community control over the scholarly communication process. SPARC also collaborates with some of the other initiatives mentioned below.

2. BioMed Central

   BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. All the original research articles in journals published by BMC are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication.

   BioMed Central ensures effective quality control through full and stringent peer review. All research articles and most other content in BMC's journals are fully and quickly peer-reviewed. In all the medical BMC journals, reviewers are asked to sign their reviews and the reviewers' reports and authors' responses are posted on the Web with the published article. BMC intends that all its journals be citation-tracked and that impact factors be established. However, BMC also believes that the current reliance on journal impact factors to assess the importance of individual articles is problematic. They are, therefore, working to develop additional methods for judging the relative importance of particular pieces of research using a combination of editorial and peer judgements, as well as citation rates and usage statistics.

   Faculty can start new, open access journals with BMC. BMC makes its online submission and peer-review technology available without charge to groups of scientists who wish to run open access, online journals under their own editorial control.

   Authors who publish original research articles in BMC journals retain copyright over their work. This secures their right to protect the integrity of their work and to have the full work referenced whenever all or part of it is reproduced. By publishing research articles in a journal published by BMC, authors agree to allow free and unrestricted non-commercial use of the work by others.

   BioMed Central is committed to developing a sustainable business model that can secure open access to biomedical research results in the long term. Currently, article-processing charges enable the costs of immediate, world-wide access to research to be covered. These costs of publishing can be built into some grants. Michigan State University is an institutional member of BioMed Central. This means researchers from MSU have the right to publish research articles in BioMed Central journals without paying article processing charges.

3. Public Library of Science

   The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. They believe that a new business model for scientific publishing is needed, one in which publication costs are part of the costs of funding a whole research project, and they also use the author-pays model to finance their journals, PLos Biology and PLoS Medicine.

   PLoS is also working with scientists, scientific societies, funding agencies, and other publishers to pursue the broader goal of ensuring open-access for the published literature.
   

   
   

4. BioOne

   SPARC is one of the collaborators in the creation, development and maintenance of BioOne. BioOne is a collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, academe and the private sector that brings to the Web an aggregation of full-text, high-impact bioscience research journals. Most of BioOne’s titles are published by small societies and non-commercial publishers, and, until now, have been available only in printed form. BioOne provides integrated, cost-effective access to interrelated journals focused on the biological, ecological and environmental sciences.

5. Open Access Journals

   Many of the new publishing models listed above involve Open Access journals. The Open Access model is one in which all users are given free, imediate access to the content of a journal to copy, use, distribute, or display, provided they give proper attribution to the author. The costs for publishing are borne not by the user but by another party: the authors themselves, their institutions, the government, or granting agencies. The work is also deposited in electronic format in an academic, society or government online repository to ensure continuing access. This Directory lists all of the journals in many kinds of disciplines currently using an Open Access publishing model.