Wiley Launches New Program of Open Access Journals

PW:

In a move it says will increase “author choice,” Wiley ... announced the launch of a new line of peer-reviewed open access journals. Under the program, dubbed Wiley Open Access, the publisher will collaborate with professional and scholarly societies, which will appoint an Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board responsible for ensuring quality, beginning with disciplines in the life and biomedical sciences, including neuroscience, microbiology, ecology and evolution.

The journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Publication will be supported by an author fee, payable on acceptance of their articles, although Wiley officials have not yet announced how much that fee would be, only that they will “introduce a range of new payment schemes,” including institutional agreements." ...

Scholarly Publishing: Web Changing the Sacred Rite of Peer Review

NYTimes.com: " ... some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience. 'What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,' said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. 'The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.' ..."