Case studies in open access publishing. Number one.

The Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon): an open access journal using an un-paid, volunteer-based organization.

Introduction This case study is based on the experiences with the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon), founded in 1995.

Development This journal is an example of a particular category of open access journals, which use neither author charges nor subscriptions to finance their operations, but rely largely on unpaid voluntary work in the spirit of the open source movement. The journal has, after some initial struggle, survived its first decade and is now established as one of half-a-dozen peer reviewed journals in its field.

Operations The journal publishes articles as they become ready, but creates virtual issues through alerting messages to “subscribers”. It has also started to publish special issues, since this helps in attracting submissions, and also helps in sharing the work-load of review management. From the start the journal adopted a rather traditional layout of the articles. After the first few years the HTML version was dropped and papers are only published in PDF format.

Performance The journal has recently been benchmarked against the competing journals in its field. Its acceptance rate of 53% is slightly higher and its average turnaround time of seven months almost a year faster compared to those journals in the sample for which data could be obtained. The server log files for the past three years have also been studied.

Conclusions Our overall experience demonstrates that it is possible to publish this type of OA journal, with a yearly publishing volume equal to a quarterly journal and involving the processing of some fifty submissions a year, using a networked volunteer-based organization.

ABSTRACT: All refereed journals will soon
be available online; most of them already are. This means that anyone will
be able to access them from any networked desk-top. The literature will
all be interconnected
by citation, author, and keyword/subject links, allowing for unheard-of
power and ease of access and navigability. Successive drafts of pre-refereeing
preprints will be linked to the official refereed draft, as well as to
any subsequent corrections, revisions, updates, comments, responses, and
underlying empirical databases, all enhancing the self-correctiveness,
interactivity and productivity of scholarly and scientific research and
communication in remarkable new ways. New scientometric
indicators of digital impact are also emerging (http://opcit.eprints.org)
to chart the online course of knowledge. But there is still one last frontier
to cross before science reaches the optimal and the inevitable: Just as
there is no longer any need for research or researchers to be constrained
by the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution, there is no
longer any need to be constrained by the impact-blocking
financial
fire-walls of Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls
for this give-away literature. Its author/researchers have always donated
their research reports for free (and its referee/researchers have refereed
for free), with the sole goal of maximizing their impact on subsequent
research (by accessing the eyes and minds of fellow-researchers, present
and future) and hence on society. Generic
(OAi-compliant) software is now available free so that institutions
can immediately create Eprint Archives in which their authors can self-archive
all their refereed papers for free for all forever (http://www.eprints.org/).
These interoperable Open Archives (http://www.openarchives.org)
will then be harvested into global, jointly searchable "virtual archives"
(e.g., http://arc.cs.odu.edu/). "Scholarly
Skywriting" in this PostGutenberg Galaxy
will be dramatically (and measurably) more interactive
and productive, spawning its own new digital metrics of productivity and
impact, allowing for an online "embryology of
knowledge."