Open Access Week 2012: OA Journals

As you learned from the "Very Brief Introduction to Open Access," one of the Open Access (OA) delivery mechanisms available to authors is the Open Access journal.  The forced migration field now has several options to choose from, as noted in this previous post.  One new development in this regard:  Refuge is due to become a fully Open Access journal, according to this vacancy announcement for a new editor-in-chief of the periodical.

Other options:  During Open Access Week 2011, I highlighted examples of OA journal titles that have carried forced migration-related articles.  For today's post, I looked through article references posted over the course of the past year and identified quite a few additional journal titles, including:

• Administrative Services
• Advances in Social Work
• Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies
• BMC Health Services Research
• BMC Infectious Diseases
• BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
• BMC Psychiatry
• BMC Research Notes
• BMJ Open
• Conservation & Society
• Democracy & Education
• EIRP Proceedings
• Emerging Infectious Diseases
• Environmental Health Perspectives
• International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
• International Journal of Population Research
• Jesuit Higher Education
• Journal of Applied Research on Children
• Journal of Infection in Developing Countries
• Journal of Injury and Violence Research
• Journal of International Women’s Studies
• Journal of Political Ecology
• Legacy
• Nursing Research and Practice
• PLoS Currents Disasters
• PLoS Medicine
• Psychiatry Investigation
• Social Space
• Vulnerable Groups & Inclusion

Not only has the list of OA journal titles expanded, but the number of articles in OA journals that I've cited has also increased significantly from a handful in 2010 to over 60 in 2012.

Another growing trend, at least reflected in this blog, is more instances of articles published according to what is referred to as the hybrid OA model.  This is when a traditional subscription-based journal offers to make articles Open Access upon payment of a processing fee.  Most journal publishers offer some version of this model, for example, Oxford University Press (OUP) has Oxford Open, Springer has Open Choice, etc.  Here are examples of five articles made available under this arrangement:

• "Are There Differences in Injury Mortality among Refugees and Immigrants Compared with Native-born?," Injury Prevention, OnlineFirst, 24 May 2012 [text]
• "Hidden Violence is Silent Rape: Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Undocumented Migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands," Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care, vol. 14, no. 5 (2012) [text]
• "‘I felt that I was benefiting someone’: Youth as Agents of Change in a Refugee Community Project," Health Education Research, vol. 27, no. 5 (Oct. 2012) [text]
• "Insecticide-Treated Plastic Sheeting for Emergency Malaria Prevention and Shelter among Displaced Populations: An Observational Cohort Study in a Refugee Setting in Sierra Leone," American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, vol. 87, no. 2 (Aug. 2012) [text]
• "Perceived Needs, Self-reported Health and Disability among Displaced Persons during an Armed Conflict in Nepal," Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, vol. 47, no. 4 (April 2012) [text]

Articles published in these OA journals are open access in terms of not only cost, but also restrictions regarding their re-use.  In other words, both price and permission barriers are removed.  This is sometimes referred to as "libre OA."  However, for many researchers, simply removing the price barrier from journal articles renders them sufficiently "open" to qualify as OA; this is referred to as "gratis OA."

Given the legal focus of forced migration, this blog references numerous articles published in legal journals and law reviews.  These titles are very often posted online as "gratis OA" publications, i.e., they are made freely accessible but retain copyright.  For multiple examples, browse through posts assigned the "law reviews" label.

So judging solely from what has been posted on my non-comprehensive, non-representative blog (!), it would seem that there is an upward trend in publishing in OA journals.  On a larger scale, this study finds that more of the growth in Open Access has come by way of self-archiving, or the second OA delivery mechanism that authors can use.  This will be the subject of tomorrow's analysis!

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