Open access initiatives are laudable but somewhat difficult to reconcile with the financial aspects of publishing highly specialized journals like the American Journal of Neuroradiology (AJNR). How do we pay for open access? Its cost can be assumed by our parent society (the American Society of Neuroradiology [ASNR]), by the authors, by government or industry sponsors, or by combinations of the above. We certainly believe it is unlikely that the government or corporations will offer their financial support in the current economic environment. ASNR has limited resources as do our contributors, many of whom are academicians, but it is only through the efforts of our society and authors that we will be able to offer wider open access. As the demographics of our readership and contributors change so will their expectations, and AJNR will be pressured to make articles freely available to all interested parties.
Four years ago, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) started what they called an “experiment” in open access. In this experiment, authors were given the opportunity to pay a surcharge of $1000 to make their articles open access immediately after on-line publication.1 Today, that fee is $850 for corresponding authors from institutions that subscribe to PNAS through a site license and $1200 for all others. Of course, like many other journals including AJNR, PNAS gives immediate open access to articles stemming from federally funded projects. Soon after, other publications such as the Journal of Leukocytobiology, the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the journals of the American Institute of Physics, and journals published by Blackwell Synergy and the Oxford University Press followed suit. The pricing for immediate open access for these publications varies between $1200 and $3000. These relatively high fees allow the publishers to strike a balance between good business sense, financial solvency, and risks inherent to open access.
With this issue, AJNR is pleased to offer a similar service to our authors at the substantially less expensive price of $500 per article. After an article has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, the corresponding author will have the choice of opting to pay this “immediate open access” fee. All such articles will be clearly identified as being open access in our table of contents. Because our fee is relatively modest, we believe that interested authors and institutions will look at this initiative positively. This also means that open-access authors may take a PDF of their article and post it on their own Website. Our copyright agreement has been altered to reflect these changes. We believe that this option will increase dissemination and use of our publications and ultimately benefit our Impact Factor. Because AJNR may lose some of its revenue from our article pay-per-view and reprint service, completely free and immediate open access might have a negative financial impact. This hybrid system works well for other journals and will give us the time needed to transform our financial model to one that better fits the future needs of the imaging, medical, and scientific communities.
In support of open access, AJNR has been offering immediate free access to all US government-funded articles, and now we have expanded this option to include publications issuing from government-sponsored projects from any country in the world. As always, all of our content is free 12 months after print publication, and all review articles are free without delay. For authors not wishing to pay the surcharge for immediate open access, the pay-per-article feature remains in place for nonsubscribers. We believe that this activity solidifies the position of AJNR as the most innovative neuroimaging journal available.
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