FYI: Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (JIABS): new website and free online access to journal content

[Dominik Wujastyk]

The new site is very smart.  Nice to see the free, open source Open Journal
System in use. And having Open Access for the older journal content is
wonderful.  Thank you!  I am looking forward to more and more leading
journals in our field adopting the OA policy.  It is so important, for many
reasons, but especially if scholars in developing countries are to be able
to share in an awareness of the most exciting and important new scholarly
advances.

Given this, it is a pity that the JIABS has adopted a five-year moving
block on access.  This would have been a perfect moment to flip to a new,
fully Open Access model of publication.  Does scrutiny of the society's (or
the library's) finances, weighed against its mission of promoting important
scholarship, truly justify this wall?  I find it hard to believe that the
society really benefits from this in a deep structural way.  Could the
financial benefits coming from the five-year wall - if any - not be
recovered through imaginative advertising, publisher promotions, user
donations, sponsorship, selling space, or other means, or even just a
reduction to a one-year wall?  There's a substantial literature on the
financial models that underly Open Access publishing, and many important
journals have overcome the hurdles of flipping from older financial models
to true open-access distribution (Doaj <http://www.doaj.org/> alone lists
7275 such journals as of today).

The University of Pittsburgh offers free support and publication for any
academic journal that adopts the full Open Access model (see
here<http://www.news.pitt.edu/news/university-pittsburgh-library-system-offers-free-e-journal-publishing-service>),
and it is widely expected that this model of learned journal publication
will grow.

It seems particularly unfortunate that the very first entry one sees on
consulting the fine new site is an obituary that can't be read by
non-members until 2016.

But forgetting my grumbles, this is a great initiative, and will surely
bring the scholarship published by JIABS to a much wider readership.
Congratulations to everyone involved.

Best,
Dominik

--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
Department of South Asia, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies,
University of Vienna,
Spitalgasse 2-4, Courtyard 2, Entrance 2.1
1090 Vienna
Austria
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On 10 November 2011 11:43, Birgit Kellner <
kellner at asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:

> Dear colleagues (apologies for cross-posting),
>
> the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (JIABS,
> ISSN: 0193-600X) has a new website, hosted by the University Library of
> Heidelberg:
>
> http://archiv.ub.uni-**heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/**jiabs/index<http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/index>
>
> The website offers full and free online access to the journal. Tables of
> contents are available for all issues; articles are made available 60
> months after their appearance in print.
>
> Currently issues 1 (1978) to 28/2 (2005) are fully accessible, and
> searchable. Articles published up to 1999 have been scanned and run
> through automatic OCR - full-text search is therefore possible, but limited
> especially when it comes to transliterations of Asian languages. For more
> recent articles the journal's production files are used. The website also
> offers RSS and Atom feeds.
>
> The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (ISSN
> 0-193-600XX) is the organ of the International Association of Buddhist
> Studies. The JIABS welcomes scholarly contributions in all areas of
> Buddhist Studies. A double-blind peer-review process is used to ensure the
> high academic quality of all contributions.
>
> With best regards,
>
> Birgit Kellner (co-editor, with Helmut Krasser of the Austrian Academy of
> Sciences)
>
> -------------
>
> Prof. Dr. Birgit Kellner
> Chair in Buddhist Studies
> Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context - Shifting
> Asymmetries in Cultural Flows"
> University of Heidelberg
> Karl Jaspers Centre
> Vossstraße 2, Building 4400
> D-69115 Heidelberg
> Phone: +49(0)6221 - 54 4301
> Fax: +49(0)6221 - 54 4012
> http://www.asia-europe.uni-**heidelberg.de/en/home.html<http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/home.html>
>


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