Blackwell Publishing's Position on Open Access
Open Access is an important development in scholarly communications which aims to deliver unrestricted access to academic research to all those who seek it. Blackwell Publishing has been proactive in the debate: monitoring the evolving issues, contributing to government and industry evaluation initiatives, and advising the 665 societies and 800+ journal editors with whom we work.
At Blackwell our primary goal is to facilitate the dissemination of research through the licensing of access to institutions and individual customers whilst continuing to provide a return to the societies for whom we publish. We will support Open Access models which ensure that viable high quality society publishing continues to flourish.
Following is a summary of the ways in which Blackwell Publishing and the societies with whom we publish are responding to the calls for Open Access publishing:
- Self-archiving - Our copyright assignment policy allows authors to self-archive their final version of their article on personal websites or institutional repositories.
- Author pays - We are offering a new service called Online Open which gives authors the choice to pay a publication fee in order for their article to be openly accessible to all.
- Free back files - Several journals offer free access to content after a set time period, or to certain types of material such as review articles.
- Developing world access We offer free or low cost access to libraries in the poorest countries through our participation in the HINARI, AGORA, OARE, INASP and related initiatives.
