The Blue Obelisk community is undertaking a survey of access to chemical Open Data through Open Access, Fuzzy Open Access, and closed Access publications. Today I looked at Wiley’s offering. (Note although Blackwell and Wiley are now one company I think I only looked at the Wiley journals.)
If you are bursting to know how many “free to read” chemistry articles Wiley has published in 2007, skip to the end. But it’s worth reading their material first.
Wiley do not – AFAIK – have any completely Open Access chemistry journals. Instead they offer a sort-of-hybrid scheme called “Funded Access”. Here’s the home page for the scheme:
Funded access on Wiley InterScience
For those authors of primary research articles whose funding agency requires deposit of an article in an archive, Wiley offers the option of funded access. With this option, the author pays a fee to ensure that the article is made available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley InterScience, as well as delivered to the funding agency’s preferred archive when applicable. This access option is available only to authors of primary research articles.
The funded access option will be offered only to those authors whose articles have been accepted for publication, and only at the point when the article is accepted, to ensure that the funded access option has no influence on the peer review and acceptance process.Authors who order the funded access option for an article should make sure that the Article Alerts setting is turned on for the Track My Articles page within the Author Resources section. The alerts setting can be accessed in Track My Articles section under the My Profile page.For more information about funded access:
- Funded access announcement (August 7, 2006)
- FAQs
- Funded access online order form
- Funded access printable order form (PDF 52k)
- E-mail: fundedaccess@wiley.com
Journals participating in funded access are [PMR I have selected only chemistry]:
- ChemBioChem
- ChemMedChem
- Electrophoresis
- Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis
- Journal of Cellular Biochemistry
- Molecular Nutrition & Food Research (formerly Nahrung/Food)
Funded Access FAQs [PMR: only certain selected]
- I have written for a journal that is not included in the list of participating journals. Can I order funded access?
- This will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis in the initial phases of this experimental program. Please note that some journals do not offer this type of access as a matter of policy.
- Will funded access articles be marked in WIS?
- Yes. Funded access articles will be identified by means of an icon
- Does the funded access program cover all funding agency archives, or only selected ones?
- Wiley’s funded access program covers all funding agencies. It does not cover “institutional repositories”, or content repositories used for commercial purposes
- How is the funded access program related to the NIH’s public acces policy?
- Wiley’s funded access is a separate program, and is not related to the NIH’s public access policy. NIH grantees are eligible for Wiley’s funded access program.
- For an article covered by funded access, can a copy of the article be deposited in the author’s institutional repository? Will Wiley provide a PDF to the author?
- No, the funded access program does not provide for PDFs to be sent to authors, or for posting of articles in institutional repositories. As with all of our policies, these will be
[PMR: this is an interesting concept – the author writes a manuscript – pays the publisher to publish it who then refuses to give a copy to the author. A PDF is only a stream of bits. It costs zero.]
Unlike the ACS who, I believe, provides “Free Access” to any journal if the author pays, Wiley deliberately forbids “Funded Access” to Angewandte Chemie (it flagship chemistry journal) and to most of the other “high impact journals”. I doubt many chemists would rank the journals above in the front rank of chemistry.
Anyway I trawled manually through the 6 journals above, looking for “Funded Access” papers in chemistry. For comparison I found an issue of Proteomics which, with considerable excitement, pronounced:
First PROTEOMICS Funded Access Paper – for FREE!
Proteomics 2006, 6, 6400–6404
So I looked through all of the TOCs for all of the issues for all the 6 journals, and tried to spot a FUNDED ACCESS icon: Here are the results in increasing numbers of FUNDED ACCESS papers:
- ChemBioChem
- ZERO
- ChemMedChem
- ZERO
- Electrophoresis
- ZERO
- Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis
- ZERO
- Journal of Cellular Biochemistry
- ZERO
- Molecular Nutrition & Food Research (formerly Nahrung/Food)
- ZERO
I may have miscounted somewhere so these figures are approximate but the sum of FUNDED ACCESS papers in chemistry published in Wiley journals appears, to a casual inspection, to be fairly close to ZERO.
But the scheme has only been going a year and I would expect the number to at least double next year.