MARITIME HISTORY ON THE INTERNET
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An Introduction to Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Publishing
f you are not employed by an academic institution, finding access to scholarly journal articles can be pretty tough. I’ve written in past columns about using ejournal lists on academic library websites, but this is, admittedly, tricky. Some academic libraries, especially at public universities, will allow anyone to use most of their resources for free if you’re physically in their library, but it varies by institution. There is, however, another way of finding scholarly content. It still isn’t easy, but doable, and it is getting easier. Scholarly publishing is currently at a major inflection point, and in the end we will likely see much more freely available scholarly content. It is a complex and confusing topic, but the background is something like this: Since the late 17th century, researchers and academics have used articles published in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals as the primary method for disseminating knowledge. In the past several decades, commercial publishers have taken over most scholarly publishing, either by publishing journals on behalf of scholarly societies, or by creating or buying journals across the academic spectrum. These high-profit publishers, particularly Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis (now publisher of Mariner’s Mirror, on behalf of the Society for Nautical Research), and several others, pursue a surprisingly lucrative market, some of them increasing prices by 15% or more each year. In the maritime history field, Northern Mariner/Mariner du Nord and Great Circle are both still published by the organizations that own them, and maintain very reasonable pricing for institutions: about $125 and $75, respectively, for print subscriptions. Taylor & Francis, however, charges institutions $687 per year for a print plus online subscription to Mariner’s Mirror. (To be fair, the publishers of the first two journals run the risk that their content will not get read, because they don’t make that content available online.) These untenable prices, combined with dramatic reductions in library budgets, have led to a variety of responses. One response has been the creation of a series of blatantly illegal websites that collect PDFs of scholarly articles and make them freely available for all to download. While one can and should object to the frustrating behavior of 56
by Peter McCracken
some commercial publishers, the illegal distribution of copyrighted work hardly seems like a useful resolution—though many scholars do use these websites to obtain the articles they seek. A more productive solution, however, is the adoption of Open Access (OA) journals and articles. Open Access publishing comes in multiple versions—Green, Gold, Diamond, and more. In Green OA, articles become freely available after a set embargo period (usually a year or two), either at the publisher’s site, or in an “institutional repository” (IR), which is usually a web server on which an educational institution shares the works of its employees. Gold OA shifts the publisher’s revenue from the subscription fees that libraries and subscribers pay, to Article Processing Charges (APCs), which are fees paid by the author or research funder, upon acceptance of the article for publication. These articles are then free for everyone to read, immediately at publication. Commercial publishers welcome this approach and have created “hybrid OA” journals, in which the authors of some articles have paid APCs, while authors of other articles have not. Publishers receive both APCs from authors and subscription fees from subscribers. Not surprisingly, publishers almost never reduce the subscription fees due to the APCs they’ve already received. In response, European funding organizations recently announced “Plan S,” which states that researchers who received funding from participating research agencies (now including the Gates Foundation in the US) must publish their work in fully OA journals, which excludes the problematic hybrid journals. Diamond OA journals are those that do not charge anyone—neither the author nor the subscriber —to publish articles. These journals can still maintain rigorous peer-review systems; their costs are simply covered through some other means. Coriolus, the online journal published by the National Maritime Digital Library, is a Diamond OA journal. Every article in every issue of Coriolus is available at https:// nmdl.org/projects/coriolus/, with no fees imposed on either readers or authors. So, what does this mean for those interested in reading scholarly articles, especially when they do not have access through SEA HISTORY 166, SPRING 2019