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 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), 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@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

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