[GOAL] Canadian Journal of Communication is a not-so-bad role model

[Heather Morrison]

The Canadian Journal of Communication is just one example of a large  
number of small society / association journals, published by scholars  
for scholars. While not fully open access, CJC is a good role model in  
many respects.

Subscription rates are $100 - $165 year (depending on print / online,  
etc.). Like many such journals, CJC has never been in the practice of  
raising subscription prices at rates above inflation year after year  
as many commercial publishers have. Journals like CJC did not create  
the crisis in scholarly communication, but many have been affected by  
it (libraries have had to cancel many journals like CJC, even at such  
low rates, to pay for the big publishers' big deals.)

Subscription information can be found here:
http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/about/subscriptions

CJC makes all of its issues freely available after one year, using the  
CC-BY-NC-ND license. This is a voluntary action which is not at all  
required by any funding agency policy. The CJC statement on this  
policy clearly indicates that the purpose of publication is  
dissemination of scholarly work, not making money for everyone -  
details:

"The journal takes the stance that the publication of scholarly  
research is meant to disseminate knowledge and, in a not-for-profit  
regime, benefits neither publisher nor author financially. It sees  
itself as having an obligation to its authors and to society to make  
content available online now that the technology allows for such a  
possibility. In keeping with this principle, the journal has published  
all of its back issues online. At the same time, were an author who  
contributed to the journal prior to the journal putting in place an  
explicit request for online rights to request that his or her work be  
removed from the CJC-Online website, the journal would remove the work.
Authors who publish in the Canadian Journal of Communication agree to  
release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution- 
Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada Licence" from: http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

On self-archiving, CJC is romeo blue - self-archiving of peer-reviewed  
postprint okay, preprints unclear. This may be more a reflection of  
the UK / large international publisher focus of Sherpa RoMEO rather  
than CJC per se, i.e. it is not clear whether anyone has worked very  
hard with publishers like this to encourage and clarify self-archiving  
rights.

CJC's policies are far from perfect - I'm not crazy about the charging  
for coursepacks through Access Copyright, for example - however  
journals like this did not create the problem in scholarly publishing,  
and considering the low cost of journal subscriptions, it should be  
possible for libraries to figure out how to support journals like this  
to thrive in a fully open access future. If there are small society  
journals like this in the UK, my suggestion is that RCUK  look into  
providing infrastructure and support for them so that they can move  
into an online OA future, assuming RCUK  can afford to subsidize  
publishing.

my two bits,

Heather Morrison