Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1646353.1646367
Viewpoint
Open Access to
Scientific publications
In HIS JUlY 2009 Communica- tions editor’s letter “Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?”, editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi addressed the question of
open access to this magazine and
to ACM publications in general. Scientific publishing, like all areas of
publishing, is undergoing major
changes. One reason is the advent
of the Internet, which fosters new
types of publishing models. Another
less-known factor is the exponential
increase in the number of scientific
publications (see the figure here),
which has turned this area into a serious business. In this column, I take a
look at commercial and Open Access
publishing, and at the role that professional societies such as ACM can
play in this evolving world.
commercial Publishing
Scientific publishing is a profitable
business: at more than 30%, the op-
erating profit margins of major com-
mercial publishers are one of the
highest across all businesses.a A ma-
jor consequence has been a massive
concentration of commercial editors
of scientific, technical, and medical
(STM) publications, with one giant (El-
sevier) and a few big players (Springer,
Thomson, Wiley). This concentration
has coincided with sharp increases
in subscription rates, and has gener-
ated razor-sharp business practices
a See, for example, http://www.researchinforma-
tion.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=141
whereby, for example, publishers sell
subscriptions to a bundle of titles that
typically contain one or two good jour-
nals among a set of second-tier ones.
The quality of a journal is typically
measured by its impact factor—the av-
erage number of citations to articles in
this journal over a unit time (typically
three years). Because of the competi-
tion among publishers, impact factors
can be, and are, manipulated: Commercial publishers ask their editors-in-chief to “encourage” authors of accepted papers to include references to their
journals. (Since they pay their editors-in-chief, it makes them more “
receptive” to such requests.) The Web-based
version of EndNote, the well-known
