Open Access and Scientific Societies

This is the second in a series of three editorials that aim to address recurring concerns about the benefi ts and risks associated with open-access publishing in medicine and the biological sciences. S cientifi c societies serve their members, their broader scholarly communities, and the different components of their missions in many important ways. Making peer-reviewed literature immediately accessible, searchable, and reusable to anyone in the world with an Internet connection is a uniquely direct means of achieving a number of goals that are common to most scholarly associations and of advancing the diverse interests of their constituencies. Setting aside for the moment the question of how feasible it is for societies to alter their journals' access policies, there is by now a broad consensus that widespread open access to scientifi c publications is good for scientists and good for science. Society members want to maximize the impact of their work—and articles that are freely available online are cited more frequently than those that are not (Lawrence 2001). Most societies are committed to catalyzing innovations within and across scientifi c disciplines—and open-access archives of full-text literature provide a valuable tool for sharing information globally in order to accelerate the rate of scientifi c progress. Many societies articulate in their mission statements the goal of communicating the benefi ts of their members' discoveries with the public— and open-access publishing is a direct means to accomplish this goal. In addition to an interest in exploring new ways to serve their members and their missions, societies have another compelling reason to investigate open access for their journals: the rapidly changing landscape of scholarly publishing. From 1990 to 2000, the average price of an academic journal subscription increased 10% per year (Create Change 2000). While society-run and nonprofi t journals may not be the major contributors to those spiraling costs, societies that rely on revenues from subscriptions and site licenses may bear a disproportionate share of the negative consequences of skyrocketing serials prices. As libraries are forced for a variety of reasons (including decreased budgets and the increasing prevalence of " big deals " and journal bundling) to eliminate subscriptions, society journals may be among the hardest hit. Journals that appeal to a relatively specialized readership and those that are not part of larger publishing groups are particularly vulnerable to the contraction of serials collections that has already begun and will likely accelerate (Create …