[GOAL] House of Lords submissions: possible resources on embargoes

[Heather Morrison]

Some resources that may be of help in framing responses on the  
question of embargoes:

Washington D.C. Principles For Free Access to Science - A Statement  
from Not-for-Profit Publishers

On March 16, 2004, "representatives from the nation’s leading not-for- 
profit medical/scientific societies and publishers announced their  
commitment to providing free access and wide dissemination of  
published research findings".

The publishing principles and practices supported by this group include:

3.  As not-for-profit publishers, we have introduced and will continue  
to support the following forms of free access:...

The full text of our journals is freely available to everyone  
worldwide either immediately or within months of publication,  
depending on each publisher’s business and publishing requirements;

The DC Principles can be found here:
http://www.dcprinciples.org/

In other words, this very traditional group of scholarly society  
publishers committed, back in 2004, to making their journals freely  
available either immediately or within months of publication. There  
are a number of indications that this is now a common practice - many  
fully open access journals, and many more that provide free access to  
back issues on a purely voluntary basis, frequently with a 12-month  
delay.

The extent of this practice may be best viewed in the Electronic  
Journals Library (EZB). The EZB is a collaborative project of 589  
libraries, based in Germany, that collects both subscription and free  
"scientific and academic full text journals". EZB currently includes  
38,066 journals - close to 30,000 more titles than are listed in the  
Directory of Open Access Journals, which is limited to fully OA  
journals. Among the 30,000 journals are a very large number of  
journals that voluntarily provide free access to back issues, with no  
policy requirement.
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/about.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en

A quick scan of the journals participating in Highwire Free  
illustrates that a 12-month embargo is very common for these kinds of  
journals:
http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl

The number of journals voluntarily contributing to PubMedCentral has  
been growing steadily - from 410 in March 2008 to 1,464 at the end of  
2012. Of these, over 1,000 voluntarily provide all content for  
immediate free access. Data here is from The Dramatic Growth of Open  
Access:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2012.html

A key point is that this data illustrates that a great many  
traditional scholarly journals have made the decision to provide free  
back to their journals with a minimal embargo period, with one year  
being common. Many such journals made this step with some concern  
about the potential impact on their subscriptions and revenue. If  
there had been dire consequences for such journals, there would be  
plenty of data today to demonstrate that providing free access after a  
brief embargo harms subscriptions. No such data has ever been brought  
forward to my knowledge. It might be reasonable to say that providing  
free access to back issues is rapidly becoming the norm for scholarly  
journals, and so this might be a recommendation for a maximum embargo  
for OA policy.

best,

Heather Morrison, PhD
Freedom for scholarship in the internet age
https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530