Page 36 - Summer 2015

Reading, Writing, and the ASA
1929, are posted on the Internet and can be downloaded without extra charge.
Extensive Content That Is Open Access
Although the current economic situation
precludes the offering of all the Society's
past and present publications as open ac-
cess (free for viewing by all), a large frac-
tion of its content is open access. It in-
cludes this magazine, Acoustics Today, and
the online journal Proceedings of Meetings
on Acoustics (POMA). The portion of JASA
labeled as JASA-Express Letters (JASA-EL)
is totally open access, and this is partially
supported by relatively modest fees paid by
the authors and/or their organizations. In
addition, the JASA editorial policy is now
that all review papers and editorials should
be open access. One reason for this is that
the Society wants to ensure that persons
not ordinarily having full access to JASA, but who are seek- ing some initial acquaintance with a subfield of acoustics, should at least have free access to the leading review papers in the field. Also, authors who are required by their orga- nizations to make sure that their publications are unassail- ably open access can have their papers in JASA designated as open access with the payment of a fee.
The Open-Access Debate and Professional Societies
The frustrations described above in regard to potential readers seeking access to published works on science and technology have contributed in part to protracted debates throughout the world and to various proposals by individu- als, organizations, commercial firms, and governments. Many universities, for example, are now posting all their faculty publications on institutional sites, with open access to anyone. A problem arises because some of these articles are copyrighted by organizations that prefer that access only be via subscriptions to the journals in which the articles are published. When I was Editor-in-Chief of the ASA and in the absence of any directives from the ASA Executive Coun- cil, I interpreted the terms of the ASA Copyright Agreement Form as allowing authors of JASA articles to freely post their works on institutional sites (as well as on personal Web sites). In addition, no problems were sensed if any author chose to post an article, with appropriate attribution, on any governmental site (such as that of the National Institutes of
34 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2015
Figure 3. Time history from 2008 to 2012 of the total number of citations to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) each calendar year. Chart is based on
data compiled by Thomson-Reuters and was prepared by Mary Guillemette, ASA Pub- lications Manager.
Health) that allows open access by the public. (This policy has been continued by the present EIC.)
However, not every organization that publishes journals has such policies, and it is also true that larger organizations may not have the degree of involvement in the overall scientific publication enterprise to make distinctions between journals and their diverse policies. Possibly as a consequence, some organizations make it an ironclad rule that all individuals over which they have full or partial financial control should publish only in journals that are totally open access (without necessarily guaranteeing the funds). Although such journals do exist, they exist only because the authors themselves (or their sponsors) pay for the publication. It cannot be done for free; someone has to pay. If not the subscribers, then it must be the authors. These organizational open-access policies, along with the desires of some authors to have their works published with negligible flack, have created commercial op- portunities for start-up organizations with no connection to professional societies. There are large variations in the fees charged and also large variations in the qualities of the Web sites and of the visual and literacy aspects of the posted ar- ticles. The situation now is that any person can get anything published, providing some fee is paid, but there is also a pos- sibility that some or many of the desires listed above may not be fulfilled with the publication.
The author pays, subscriber does not pay option, creates a problem for a professional organization such as the ASA.