Independent Journals: Solutions for Low-cost, Open Access Journal Publishing

The growing momentum of the world wide open access movement has splurged a parallel trend of development of open source and low cost electronic publishing systems and digital repository services. These growth and development strongly reflect the desire of the scholarly communities to take back control of aspects of scholarly communication and to improve processes for the dissemination and impact of their research. The development of journal publication systems makes it easier for university presses, libraries, societies, and individual researchers to launch and run open access journals. Researchers are now less dependant on the decisions of large publishers as to which journals should be published (decisions that are often made on financial, rather than academic, grounds), how the journals should be priced, access policies, etc. Digital publishing systems also allow scholarly communities to experiment with innovative formats, to contribute to sharing and re-using digital research data, and overcome the limits of traditional publishing.