5 a - Open access journals
One response to the high cost of journal subscriptions has been the open access publishing model. Peer-reviewed journals, some of them quite prestigious, are made freely available over the Internet with the costs of peer-reviewing and publishing carried by the authors or their host institutions.
While many open access journals are relatively small "shoestring" operations some open access publishers have developed into major operations putting out highly-regarded titles. For example PLOS Biology (Public Library of Science) is the most highly-cited journal in the area of general biology while many of the journals in the BioMedCentral collection have very respectable rankings in their respective fields.
5 b - Article processing charges
The downside of open access publishing from an author's point of view is the "article-processing charge" - for the journal BMC Anesthesiology this is currently £1175 (around $NZ2,400). While it has been of great benefit to libraries and non-affiliated researchers open access publishing may tend to favour well-established researchers and those from well-heeled institutions.
In addition to wholly open access journals some commercially published titles such as Molecular Biology and Evolution allow authors to designate their own articles as open access on payment of a fee. Springer Publishers operate a system known as Open Choice across all of their titles which allows authors to pay for their articles to be made open access while Oxford Journals have a substantial number of optional (author pays) journals and a small number of full open access titles.
5 c - Wholly free titles
Many of the original Internet-only journals started by universities and groups of scholars in the 1990s did not continue, but with strong institutional support and well-developed and committed scholarly communities some open-access journals such as the Journal of Universal Computer Science are able to maintain a respectable academic standing without either subscriptions or article-processing fees.
5 d - Funding body support
There is considerable support for open access publishing from research funding bodies. In the United States the National Institute of Health open access policy requires that journal articles reporting research they have funded be placed in the PubMed Central digital archive within twelve months of publication. In the UK The Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council announced their Policy on Access to Research Outputs in January 2009.
In some countries additional money is built into research grants to cover the article processing costs of open access publishing.
5 e - Exercise
Use The Directory of Open Access Journals to find a journal in your own area and find out what the conditions of submission are.
5 f - Institutional repositories
Another response to the high cost of academic journals has been the growth of institutional digital repositories. Many universities and other organisations have begun to create openly-accessible collections of their published research to promote both their own profiles and the public good. Although copyright has generally been assigned to commercial publishers most of them will allow their articles to appear in repositories providing the version used is not the formally published one. The SHERPA/RoMEO website maintains an extensive list of publishers' policies on inclusion of copyrighted material in repositories.
Some universities such as Queensland University of Technology and Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences require staff to place their publications in the institutional repository wherever this is possible.
Massey University has its own repository – Massey Research Online - and all theses begun from 2007 will be placed there. Submission of other material is voluntary. Theses, articles, reports, book chapters and other published work placed in a repository will be accessible to more Internet users than it would be if it were solely available through the paid-for journal and there is a strong argument that open access articles are more highly cited than others.
Material in repositories is harvested by a variety of search engines, the most notable being Google Scholar. In New Zealand the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS) indexes all the materials in New Zealand repositories. Because the repositories contain full documents your search will actually search all the words, even in a thesis.
5 g - Exercise
Search KRIS for material on a topic of interest. If that fails try searching for wetlands.
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