Open access publishing in the developing world: economics and impact

Sahu, DK (2006) Open access publishing in the developing world: economics and impact. In: Asia Commons: Asian Conference on the Digital Commons, 6-8 June 2006, Bangkok, Thailand.

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Abstract

Journals from the developing world, especially the smaller ones published by scholarly / non-profit associations or academic institutions suffer from the problem of limited accessibility and visibility. With the limited reach the journal fails to attract good authors and remains unrecognized at the international academic level. Electronic publication, especially open access offers the right medium for these journals to showcase the research from the developing world. Medknow Publications offers services for journals with the objective to improve the accessibility and visibility. Medknow offers an online manuscript submission and peer-review system which helps the journal offices to saves time and resources and improves on the turnaround time for manuscript review process. The journals published by Medknow offer immediate free access which helps to increase visibility and attract authors and citations. The cost for publishing is shared by subscriptions to the print journals, advertisements in print and online media, association membership fee and author reprints. The open publishing model adopted by Medknow for over 4 years now is unique where the author or authors’ institutions do not pay a fee for submission, processing or publication of the articles – ‘Fee-less-Free’. Nine journals which are providing free access for last 3 years have reported no loss of subscriptions to the print version and in fact, have gained from the increasing subscriptions. Many journals which were running into losses are now self-sufficient to run the shown. It could be concluded that open access helps to improve the accessibility of the journals.

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