April 2005 • Volume 39 • Number 4

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Council Makes Online Journal Research Available for Free after 24 Months

Beginning in April, research published in Phytopathology, Plant Disease, and Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions (MPMI) becomes accessible for free after 24 months of subscriber-only access. This will result in immediate free access to APS journal content published between 1997 and April 2003. For each journal, a two-year-old issue will gain free-access status when the current month’s issue is published on the web. The APS Council voted on this partial open access model based on the findings of an ad hoc journal committee led by John Andrews. “Our journals represent the center of our universe. They are critical to our future as a science and as a professional organization,” states Jim MacDonald, APS president. “It is essential that we make the research published in our journals widely accessible to the electronic audience of today, while at the same time protecting the financial health of those journals and ultimately of APS.”

Andrews asserts, “Allowing free access two years after publication will open a lot of useful research to many who may not have had access to our online journals before.” This point is emphasized by a report given during the APS Publications Board meeting. “The research published in Phytopathology has a relatively long half-life, and the journal’s articles are cited quite frequently for as many as 10 years after publication,” according to Chris Mundt, editor-in-chief of the journal. Journal “half-life” is the number of journal publication years, going back from the current year, that account for 50% of the total citations received by the cited journal in the current year. “Many societies are struggling with the issue of offering some partial open access as an expected practice while also protecting financial viability,” says Mundt. “The longer half-life of Phytopathology offers a special challenge because it opens up research that is still very valuable to our science.” In a staff report on APS journals’ online usage statistics at the National Agriculture Library, as much as 50% of the APS research accessed (not necessarily cited) by scientists was for articles more than two years old.

“It is vital to the health of the journals that more scientists cite, use, and become acquainted with the society journals,” says Andrews. “I encourage all APS members to ask their librarians to make sure the APS online journals are in the libraries’ electronic catalogs with live links to our journal home pages. More importantly, as APS members and plant pathologists, we must ask our librarians to subscribe to the paid content, which is the most recent two years of the journals.” (Please ask your librarian to request online subscription access via www.apsnet.org/journals/form.pdf)

Andrews reported that other improvements to the APS online journals will be coming soon. “Plans are in progress to digitize all APS journal research published prior to 1997. This research will be integrated into the search platform of our paid subscription content, but access to the archival content will be open. Details about the timing and scope of this archival digitization project will be reported soon.”

In allowing free access to some of the published APS journal content, APS is not relinquishing copyright. The society will retain copyright, ensuring that the research remains protected from misuse.
 

APS Officer Election
Watch E-mail for Online Ballot in May

The 2005 APS Officer Election will be conducted online. APS members who have given their e-mail address to APS headquarters will receive a broadcast e-mail on May 2, 2005, with instructions for voting online.

Make sure you are receiving all APS e-mail by confirming receipt with your ISP or IS department of e-mail from addresses that end in “@scisoc.org”; contact Amy Steigman (asteigman@scisoc.org) if you have any questions.

You may also want to check your listing in the APSnet online directory to ensure we have an accurate e-mail address on file for you. To update your record, submit your changes prior to the election at www.apsnet.org/members/update.asp.

Members will only be able to access the online ballot via the e-mail message. The web interface allows only one vote per individual.

Voting begins May 2, 2005, and will close on May 31, 2005. Watch next month’s issue for the slate of candidates and their biographies. Make sure to vote online—your vote counts!
 

 
Also in this issue:(as a .PDF file, see link below)

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