Societies and Open Access Research

• This page is part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP).

• The goal of the Societies and Open Access Research (SOAR) project is to make a comprehensive list of scholarly societies worldwide that support gold OA for their own journals. The society's relationship to its OA journals might be that of owner, publisher, or partner with the publisher.

• Peter Suber and Caroline Sutton started the Societies and Open Access Research (SOAR) project in 2007, before the launch of HOAP. But Peter Suber's participation became part of HOAP in 2011, as did Amanda Page's in 2013. However, HOAP itself is only one contributor, and Caroline Sutton continues as a project principal.

• Suggested short URL for this page = bit.ly/hoap-soar

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Catalog

• The catalog itself: Society publishers with open access journals
  • By Caroline Sutton, Peter Suber, and Amanda Page.
  • Highlight: As of December 10, 2013, the catalog lists 838 societies publishing 785 full (non-hybrid) OA journals.
  • The latest edition of the catalog is the third edition, released September 16, 2013.
  • The catalog is a Google Spreadsheet under a CC-BY license.
  • Originally the spreadsheet was open for public editing. Unfortunately vandalism forced us to close public editing in April 2013, although the spreadsheet remains OA under CC-BY for reading and reuse. We'll re-open it for public editing when we think it's safe to do so. In the meantime, we continue to update the spreadsheet ourselves. If you have additions or corrections, please send them to Amanda Page.
  • Suggested short URL for the catalog = bit.ly/oaj-society

• Editions of the catalog, and accompanying articles
  • Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber released the first edition of the catalog in September 2007. At that time, the catalog was a downloadable Excel spreadsheet under a CC-BY license. It's still available, though superseded. Caroline and Peter also wrote an article to accompany the catalog, Society publishers with open access journals, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, November 2, 2007.
  • Caroline and Peter released the second edition on December 2, 2011. This edition launched the Google spreadsheet that we're still using for the third and current edition. Peter wrote an article to accompany the second edition, Open access journals from society publishers, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, December 2, 2011.
  • The second edition was open to public edits, and continuously updated. For those reasons, we didn't plan to release a third edition. But we did so in September 2013 in order to add Amanda Page as a co-author, in recognition of her work enlarging and improving the catalog.

Maps

• OA Journals Published by Societies: Maps and Data Visualizations
  • The maps were created by Amanda Page and released on October 21, 2013.
  • The maps will soon move to the HOAP wiki. See the growing SOAR maps page.

Related resources

• Gold Open Access for Learned Societies? UK Open Access Implementation Group. First released in January 2013; last revised October 2013.

• Items tagged with "oa.societies" at the Open Access Tracking Project. Continuously updated.

• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). See especially the OASPA page on society publishers.

• Heather Piwowar, OA Options For A Society Journal, Research Remix, May 11, 2013.