The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) is delighted to announce that it has been awarded funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to support open-access delivery of its journals, Acta Crystallographica Sections A-E, Journal of Applied Crystallography and Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, via its Crystallography Journals Online service for a third successive year. The award will mean the waiving of open-access publication charges for UK higher education staff who publish in these journals for a one-year period from 1 March 2006. The investment received so far has helped the IUCr to provide UK authors with extra choice and improve access to published content, allowing the publication of over 570 open-access articles: 255 in 2004 and 322 in the first nine months of 2005.
JISC is a committee of all UK further and higher education funding
bodies, and is responsible for supporting the innovative use of
information and communication technology to support learning, teaching
and research. In December 2003, publishers were invited to tender for
open-access funding of £150,000, the first round in a three-year
programme designed to encourage as much open-access delivery of
research findings as possible. The results of the full evaluation of
the programme will be made available to the academic and research
community in due course.
The JISC initiative coincides with the IUCr's support of open standards as a means to promote its statutory objective of disseminating crystallographic information to the widest possible audience. From the beginning of 2004, authors publishing papers in IUCr journals have been given the opportunity to make their papers open access on Crystallography Journals Online, i.e. free of charge to all readers. Open-access papers will appear alongside standard subscriber-only papers for the foreseeable future.
The normal charge for making an article open access is £500. This charge is based on the average cost for the IUCr to produce the first copy of the article, excluding printing and distribution costs, and includes a contribution to the cost of the long-term preservation and access of the publication. Revenue generated from open-access payments will be used to keep subscription costs as low as possible. Open-access articles will be clearly marked in contents pages and search results, and because they are freely available, are likely to be cited more frequently.
The IUCr journals, the first of which was established in 1948, appear consistently at the top of the ISI citation rankings for crystallography, and have a deserved reputation for high publication standards. They are published in conjunction with Wiley-Blackwell. For information about submitting articles, please visit http://journals.iucr.org. More information about the IUCr's open-access policy is available at http://journals.iucr.org/services/openaccess.html.