Chapter 7 The Post-Gutenberg Open Access Journal

Some think the most radical feature of post-Gutenberg journals will be the fact that they are digital and online, but that would be a much more modest development if their contents were to continue to be kept behind financial firewalls, with access denied to all who cannot or will not pay the tolls. This chapter will show how the optimal and inevitable outcome – for scientific and scholarly research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the vast research and development industry, and the society whose taxes support science and scholarship and for whose benefit the research is conducted – will be that all published research articles will be openly accessible online, free for all would-be users webwide. The classical learned journal To understand the journal of the future, however, we must first understand the journal of the present. This chapter is exclusively about refereed journals, not about trade journals, magazines or newsletters. These journals publish only peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly research. According to Ulrich’s, there are about 25,000 of them, publishing about 2.5 million articles per year, across all disciplines and in all languages. There are, however, some uncertainties about Ulrich’s classification scheme and about the average article count for journals that are not indexed by Thompson-Reuters ISI (ISI journals average somewhat over 100 articles per year). With this in mind, Bjork et al. (2008) made a lower estimate of 23,750 journals and 1.35 million articles per year. Refereed journals have the following properties