Showing posts with label journals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journals. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Online issues of Indological journals

I repeatedly find my self searching for back issues of journals, and between searches I forget what I learned the first time.  Here are some notes to myself, to remind myself what can be found online.  I'm writing this in April 2018, so moving walls will have moved in future years.
  • Indo-Iranian Journal
  • Indologica Taurinensia
  • Journal asiatique (with gaps):
  • Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies (Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu)
  • JIABS: Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 

  • Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
  •  Journal of the Royal Asiatic of Bengal
  • Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay
  • Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
    • 1824-1834 JSTOR (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland)
    • 1834-1990 JSTOR (The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
    • 1991-2013 JSTOR (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society)
  • Journal of the Pali Text Society
  • Orientalia Suecana
  • Philosophy East and West 1951-2014
  • The Pandit many issues identified and linked at Shreevatsa's blog.
  • Transactions of the Philological Society  
    • many issues from 1854-1946 identified and linked by U. Penn.
  • Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Süd- und Ostasiens
    • 1991-20?? JSTOR , five-year moving wall.
  • Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
    • 1847-present (I believe) JSTOR; MLU (1847-2013, more coming).

Thursday, September 29, 2016

What's the point of an academic journal?

Presuppositions

I find that I often read my academic colleagues' papers at academia.edu and other similar repositories, or they send me their drafts directly.  I am not always aware of whether the paper has been published or not.  Sometimes I can see that I'm looking at a word-processed document (double spacing, etc.); other times the paper is so smart it's impossible to distinguish from a formally-published piece of writing (LaTeX etc.).

Reading colleagues' drafts gives me access to the cutting edge of recent research.  Reading in a journal can mean I'm looking at something the author had finished with one, two or even three years ago.  In that sense, reading drafts is like attending a conference.  You find out what's going on, even if the materials are rough at the edges.  You participate in the current conversation.

In many ways, reading colleagues' writings informally like this is more similar to the medieval ways of knowledge-exchange that were dominated by letter-writing.  The most famous example is Mersenne (fl. 1600), who was at the centre of a very important network of letter-writers, and just preceded the founding of the first academic journal, Henry Oldenberg's Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (founded 1665).

What am I missing?


Editorial control

What I don't get by reading private drafts is the curatorial intervention of a board of editors.  A journal's editorial board acts as a gatekeeper for knowledge, making decisions about what is worth propagating and what is not worth propagating.  The board also makes small improvements and changes to submissions, required since many academic authors are poor writers, and because of the natural processes of error. So, a good editorial board makes curatorial decisions about what to display, and improves quality.

Counter-argument: Many editorial boards don't do their work professionally. The extended "advisory board members" are window-dressing; the real editorial activity is often carried out by only one dynamic person, perhaps with secretarial support.  This depends, of course, on the size of the journal and the academic field it serves.  I'm thinking of sub-fields in the humanities.

Archiving and findability

A journal also provides archival storage for the long term.  This is critically important.  An essential process in academic work is to "consult the archive."  The archive has to actually be there in order to be accessed.  A journal - in print or electronically - offers a stable way of finding scholars' work through metadata tagging (aka cataloguing), and through long-term physical or electronic storage.  If I read a colleagues' draft, I may not be able to find it again in a year's time.  Is it still at academia.edu?  Where?  Did I save a copy on my hard drive?  Is my hard drive well-organized and backed up (in which case, is it a journal of sorts?)?

Counter-argument:  Are electronic journals archival?  Are they going to be findable in a decade's time?  Some are, some aren't.  The same goes for print, but print is - at the present time - more durable, and more likely to be findable in future years.  An example is the All India Ayurvedic Directory, published in the years around the 1940s.  A very valuable document of social and medical history.  It's unavailable through normal channels.  Only a couple of issues have been microfilmed or are in libraries.  Most of the journal is probably available in Kottayam or Trissur in Kerala, but it would take a journey to find it and a lot of local diplomatic effort to be given permission to see it.  Nevertheless, it probably exists, just.

Prestige

A journal may develop a reputation that facilitates trust in the articles published by that journal.  This is primarily of importance for people who don't have time to read for themselves and to engage in the primary scholarly activity of thinking and making judgements based on arguments and evidence.  A journal's prestige may also play a part in embedding it in networks of scholarly trust and shared but not known knowledge, in the sense developed by Michael Polanyi (Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension and other writings).

Conclusion

At the moment, I can't think of any other justifications for the existence of journals.  But if editorial functions and long-term storage work properly, they are major factors that are worth having.

Further reading

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal#New_developments
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_communication
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

How "open" is "Open Access"

As the Open Access model becomes increasingly important for public knowledge dissemination, some agencies with vested interests have begun to complicate matters by introducing hybrid publishing models.  Some of these are not fully in the interests of authors or readers.

PLOS has a great discussion about the issues at stake, and they refer to the OAS brochure, which is provided in many languages.

The second page of this OAS brochure is very short, clear and helpful.  Recommended!


Monday, January 21, 2013

Business models for Open Access journals

It seems to be becoming clear that OA publishing will come to be the dominant model for academic periodical publications.  This change is happening rapidly in Science, Technology and Medicine publishing.  It can be expected that Humanities journals will eventually follow in even greater numbers than at present.

As things change, some interesting new business models are emerging.  See http://peerJ.com, for example.  It turns on its head the idea of subscribing to a learned society and getting the society's journal.  Quite fascinating. 

See also the new OA projects by CUP, (£500 publishing fee) and especially Tim Gowers' blog., that describes several key points clearly.


Some of my own thoughts

In August 2008 I did some brain-storming on this subject with my friends C. V. Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan.  Here are some of my notes from those exchanges.

I was thinking about this problem that if the funding model changes from "reader pays" to "author pays", then not everyone could afford to publish.  Independent scholars, or those at 3rd world universities, might be priced out of publication.
  1. An OA journal *must* consider itself free to publish good peer-reviewed research, whether or not there's funding.  So there has to be a "let-out" or discretionary waiver clause in any statement about pricing.
  2. Would it be feasible for the journal to have a sliding scale of charges that is directly keyed to the budget of the institution to which the author belongs?  University budgets should be publicly available somewhere, shouldn't they?  It might take a bit of work to track them down, but it could be done.  Or the authors could simply be asked to provide that information.  In any case, if a university has a big endowment or annual budget, then their staff would be charged more to publish in the journal, and v.v.  Independent scholars would be free (?) or <$100. 

    The general idea is that a scholar from Cambridge Univ. or the TIFR, Bombay, could be charged $500 to publish an article in our hypothetical OA journal, on the assumption that his department has a budget for this (an "article processing fee").  Whereas Prof. Shivaramakrishna from a Jnanamatha in Trichy, or a Dr Salvador from Havana Univ., could be permitted to publish at $30.

    Or if direct keying is not easy to implement, there could at least be general funding bands: we could find somebody else's ranking, perhaps UNESCO, for national education budgets, or educational funding, and use those as bands for submission charges.
  3. Here's an important tweak.  I think this kind of banded charging can be thought of a bit like Google's AdSense advertising system.  Basically, the university is paying to have its name associated with the research that is published.  So at the top of the article it says,

      Dominik Wujastyk
      University College London
      [university address]

    and the University pays the journal $100 (or whatever) for document processing.

    However, if I - as an author - choose, I can say instead,

       Dominik Wujastyk
       Independent Scholar
       [home address]

    and then there would be no charge for document processing.

    It wouldn't matter to the journal whether it was actually true or not that DW was an "independent scholar". The point is, if there's no payment, then the university or research sponsor doesn't get its name mentioned, and is therefore not formally associated with the research. This treats the association of the university's name with the research rather like advertising or product placement.

    Most research contracts require the academic to include acknowledgement in his publications of the source of the funding. "This research was carried out under grant 123456789 of the National Science Foundation". So if the NSF is making such a requirement, they have to pay for it to be done. It's quite like advertising.

Friday, June 22, 2012

(Deep breath) Medical history again

The story so far

My three previous blogs on this topic are, in chronological order,  1 here, 2 here, and 3 here.
(All my blogs on the topic of the journal Medical History are collected here.)


  1. In the first post, I sketched the history of this important journal and expressed regret about the journal's move from the Free-to-read, Open Access, author's copyright model to a pay-to-read, closed access, publisher's copyright model. 

    The journal's new editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, responded here, defending the new policies.
  2. I responded here, noting that the new website was inconsistent, and that there were unsolved contradictions about payment structures, and that in no case did the publisher offer the author the option of retaining copyright.
  3. When the first new issue appeared in January 2012, I noted that articles were freely downloadable and authors were ascribed copyright. This was very good for the authors and readers, but some contradictory information about rights and payments continued to be present on the publisher's website. 

And now...

No abstract
The April 2012 issue of Medical History is out.  I'm sorry indeed to see that things have changed for both this issue and the previous January one.  The freedoms that were earlier present in the January issue have been revoked.  The statements giving authors copyright have been removed.  Articles are not freely downloadable.

No way to read the article...
Most bizarre of all, no articles are now readable at all.  Even at a price.  The website give abstracts for most - but not all - articles (see above right).  But that's all.  Even if you have an account with the CUP journals site, and log in, you still cannot read any articles in Medical History.
You can link to them, you can refer to them, you can link, blog and write to the author.  You can request permissions, e.g., to reprint or copy the article.  You can do most things, except reading the articles (see left).

This surely has to be a temporary glitch?

If you are logging in from an institutional licensee, such as a university network, then yes, you can download the PDFs.  But if you do not have such an affiliation, then you cannot download any article.

No downloads at PMC
I thought that perhaps the articles were now at Pub Med Central (PMC), as Sanjoy had said they would be, and that readers were meant to know this and read the articles from there.  But that's not the case either.  Neither of the new issues has appeared at PMC (see right).  It was always understood that there would be a time-lag before articles appeared at PMC, and the journal is starting again from zero, administratively speaking, so perhaps it's just a matter of patience before the freely-downloadable version of the articles appear.

Subscription prices
However, as long as an individual cannot download the articles at all from anywhere, I suppose the only way to read the journal is to order a printed copy.  But one can only buy the printed journal if one is an organisation (left).  So for anyone who doesn't have access to an institutional licence, access to Medical History is limited or impossible.

Back issues

And, confusingly, CUP is offering to sell rights to consult the past archive, that the Wellcome Trust has paid for already to be freely available at PMC: "... access to the digitised archive must be purchased separately. Please email [so-and-so] for a tailored package quote." This again must be a glitch.

In general, it looks as if CUP is trying to fit Medical History into a Procrustean bed designed for its other more commercial offerings.

On CUP's MH website under "back issues / digitised archive," selected past issues of MH are now displayed (see right).  But once again, there is no button for actually downloading a PDF for any of the articles.  Nor is there any link to PMC, where whole journal from 1957-2011 is already available free.

New Open Access Policy

I think the terms of the Open Access agreement for Medical History have changed since I last looked at them.  I don't remember seeig the following statement:
If you choose to publish your article in this way [Open Access] you are required to complete the following form, within one week of your
manuscript being accepted for publication by Medical History. If you prefer not to take part in the Open Access option,
you need not do anything; your article will be published in the usual way, with access to the complete text being available only
to subscribers
. [my bold]
The corresponding author should complete this form, and by doing so he or she authorises that the full charge of £425/$675,
plus VAT where applicable, will be paid.
CUP will NOT grant Open Access to your article unless you pay them $675.  This statement raises serious questions about whether all articles will continue to appear in PMC, as asserted by Sanjoy and as desired by the Wellcome Trust.

Summary

So, where do things stand now?
  1. Authors don't have copyright, in any model of publication in MH.
  2. Articles are not freely downloadable.
  3. Articles cannot be downloaded at all by private persons, even for purchase.
  4. Private persons apparently cannot buy the print version of journal issues.
  5. CUP wants to charge for access to past archived issues of the journal.
  6. No article will be available Open Access unless $675 is paid by the author.
I still hope that some of these issues are just teething problems.  I also hope that, as Sanjoy said, articles will appear as free downloads at the PMC site, in a "version of record," and that the current de facto embargo period of six months and growing is also just an initial administrative problem.

Between 2005 and 2011, Medical History was an Open Access journal that assigned copyright to individual authors, and charged no fee to authors or to readers.  The journal embraced all the best and most innovative models of the distribution of scholarly knowledge (see Open knowledge, Open definition, Open Access).   That model of publication has been abandoned, in favour of a closed-access, strongly commercialized system.  If all MH articles start to appear for free, full-text, version-of-record download at PMC, it will make a big difference.  But it remains hard to see how the commercial and copyright requirements of CUP can be squared with free distribution though PMC.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Medical History (cont.)

The January 2012 issue of the journal Medical History has now appeared online (here).  This is the first issue with the new publishers and under the new editorship.

The good news is that
  • the articles are copyrighted to the authors, and
  • articles are freely downloadable.  
This is very good for the authors and readers.  However, the terms on which the papers may be distributed are not stated.  The authors may not wish their papers to be copied, or they may wish to charge for copies, or they may wish to apply one of the several Creative Commons licenses.  Nothing is stated.  However, since the PDFs of the papers are freely downloadable from the CUP website, obviously this is what the authors and the publisher intend readers to do.

If you click the "Request Permissions" on the CUP website, then a window opens in which CUP asserts its own copyright of the article.

A menu system lets you request various things, including the right to make photocopies not-for-profit.  The charge for this right (not the copies themselves) is about $5 per copy.  This charging option appears to be an honour system.

The Transfer of Copyright form is still presented for authors to sign (here), by which authors sign over their copyright to CUP.  But since authors seem to be keeping their copyright (a very good thing) perhaps these forms are just a relic, and will be withdrawn.

The same applies to the Open Access Transfer of Copyright form (here), which asks authors to send CUP £425/$675 (plus VAT) for giving their copyright to CUP and having CUP publish their articles under an Open Access license.  Perhaps if one paid this fee, the "Request Permissions" page would not ask for money for photocopies?  In any case, since everyone can download the articles freely already, and they are copyrighted to the authors, there would seem to be little incentive to pay the above fee.  The authors - who own the copyright - could themselves choose to place a Creative Commons license on their work, for example an Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs license, thereby releasing any reader from the obligation to pay anything for making copies or using the article in teaching, linking to it from a Moodle website, etc.

So, at present, the rights and distribution situation with Medical History shows real promise.  Authors are retaining their copyright, and articles are freely downloadable from the CUP website.  This is great   In due course, presumably the articles will also appear in the online Medical History archive at the National Library of Medicine / Pub Med Central (here), as the editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya said they would.

Residual confusions exist because of the continuing statements on the journal's CUP website that CUP owns the copyright of the articles, and that it wants authors to transfer their rights to CUP and to pay fees for Open Access distribution.  It is very much to be hoped that these are just teething problems and that the journal will continue to
  • allow authors to retain copyright 
  • that authors will not be charged any "article processing fee", and
  • that articles will be freely readable by anyone anywhere.

Friday, March 30, 2012

"Medical History" going from free, Open Access, Creative Commons licensed to copyright-controlled closed access (contd.)

Hi, Sanjoy, thanks for responding. 

What you say in your comment differs from what the CUP website says, and on all the most important points.  Some things still need clearing up.

If all authors are to retain copyright, why does the CUP website for medical history present "Transfer of Copyright" forms to prospective MH authors? Here's the location:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayMoreInfo?jid=MDH&type=tcr

The first, non-OA form says, "The Journal's policy is to acquire copyright in all contributions."

The second, OA form also requires authors to transfer their copyright to CUP in full, just like the first.  In spite of having paid a $1350 fee to CUP, authors who sign this form will not retain copyright of their own work.  It is CUP, as the new copyright holder, who will offer a Creative Commons licence, not the author.  As they say in the form, "Cambridge University Press will licence such uses under the following Creative Commons licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike".  And in fact, it is not even a full CC licence, since CUP specifically forbids authors from using their articles in certain ways.

In all cases, therefore, both closed- and open- access, the CUP website clearly states that it is CUP and not the authors who will hold the copyright.  This is the opposite of the journal's policy from 2005 to 2011, and the opposite of what you say in your comment above.

Where the CUP website talks about "Gold Open Access",
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displaySpecialPage?pageId=3384
I think they are being slightly misleading.  They say, "Gold Open Access: Authors may opt to publish their article under a Creative Commons licence by paying a one-off article processing charge, making their article freely available to all."  I think most readers would, like you, assume from this statement that it is the author who will own the Creative Commons licence.  But that is incorrect.  CUP will be the owner of the CC license, and the copyright.  The author is paying CUP so that CUP - qua copyright holder - will issue a CC licence.  The author's relationship to their own research is therefore just the same as any other member of the public, with CUP controlling all the rights.

--

Can you really confirm that the PMC version of MH articles will be, as you say, the "final version of record"?  The CUP documentation
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displaySpecialPage?pageId=3384
uses the phrase "Accepted Manuscript" which is not the same thing.  An "accepted manuscript" would normally not have the pagination of the final version, nor the final edits of CUP's editorial staff.  So it is not usually an adequate source for scholarly citation, and it is not what appears in print.

If you are right in asserting that it is the "final version of record" that will go into PMC, then I think readers of your comment may wonder why any MH author would ever choose to pay the $1350 "Golden" fee, if their article is already freely available on the web in "final, published version of record".  Does it seem good value to pay $1350 in order to have one's article available from a second website, when it is already freely downloadable from PMC?

I look forward to your clarifications.

And to be clear myself: I applaud your efforts to give MH a future, and I applaud the Wellcome Trust for their generosity.  I just sincerely hope that the new deal for MH isn't Faustian.  The model under which MH operated from 2005 was so exemplary - with true, free OA, and authors' copyright - that it would inevitably be sad to see the doors slamming shut.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

CUP online article rental

As you can tell, I'm interested in newly-emerging models for the distribution of academic knowledge.

Cambridge University Press sells articles from its journals for about $30 each.  But they have also introduced a "rental" system, whereby they will give you online access to the PDF of an article for 24 hours at a much lower price, typically $5.99.  See here for an example.  A rented article cannot be downloaded, printed or cut-n-pasted (details here).

I have not been able to test this service, because it depends on a java applet, and on my system this does not initialize correctly.  I get a blank screen.  I've tried both Firefox and Chromium.  I'm using a correct and up-to-date version of java,

java version "1.6.0_23"OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11pre) (6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.2)OpenJDK Server VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode)
running under Ubuntu, all very standard.  It seems likely that CUP hasn't tested their new rental delivery system widely enough yet.  CUP gives no warnings about any problems, nor any specifications about special systems or computer platforms that may be necessary.  All they say is that you need a browser and internet access.
Caveat emptor.
This is an interesting model, and I think I quite like it.  The abstracts of articles are available freely, so one can get a reasonably good idea of what is likely to be in the article without paying anything.  It would be better to have page one also.  The 24-hour access is interesting because it means you have to decide to read the article just before you rent it.  You have a day and a night to read it.  Sometimes I download an article but then never get round to reading it.  The rental system makes that impossible.  You can't keep it, and your time is running out, so it is likely that you will pay and then read the thing there and then, barring interruptions from your children.

The price, $5.99, is nearly right, but it is still too high.  It is a deterrent price.  It effectively stops you browsing items that might-or-might-not be of interest.  It kills serendipity, which is a crucial element of serious academic research.  A reasonable price would be $3-$4, which in today's economy is a fair price for something that is likely to be only about 20 pages long at the outside, and usually of undetermined value to your research.  Compare with emusic.com charging £0.42-£0.49 for a single track from a CD.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

"Medical History" going from free, Open Access, Creative Commons licensed to copyright-controlled closed access

In a controversial move, the journal Medical History is moving from being an "Open Access, no Article Processing Fee" journal to being a closed, copyrighted, fee-charging journal.

1957: the launch
The first issue of Medical History, edited by W. J. Bishop, appeared in 1957 (front matter).  Medical History rapidly established itself as a journal of primary importance in the field of medical history, especially in the anglophone world.  In many ways the evolution of the journal's content from 1957 to the present day is a mirror of the evolution of the field of medical history itself, from the reminiscences of senior physicians to the work of professionalised medical and social historians.  From its earliest issues it included the writings of such figures as Charles Singer, Lynn Thorndike, and Walter Pagel, and over more than half a century Medical History has become a journal of record for its academic field.

At its launch, the journal was printed and published by Dawsons of Pall Mall.  An annual subscription to four issues cost $7.50, or $2.50 for society members.

1960: Wellcome Trust funding
In 1960, just a year before his death, Bishop published a letter to the readers announcing that the Wellcome Trust had made a five-year grant to enable the journal to continue publication.  This grant was an appropriate decision by the Trust, at that time still bound by the terms of Sir Henry Wellcome's Will that included a stipulation that the Trust should support the study of the history of medicine (see, e.g., the first and first and second reports of the Wellcome Trust).

1965: Wellcome Trust ownership
Five years later, when the Wellcome Trust's initial grant came to an end, Dawsons decided no longer to publish the journal, and "surrendered all their rights in the journal."  Its publication was transferred to the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (see here).  Since the WHML was owned and solely funded by the Wellcome Trust, this change effectively institutionalised the Trust's support for Medical History.  That support has enabled the journal to continue publication until last year.

2005-2011: The Open Access years
But the single biggest change in the journal's history came in 2005.  That year, the Wellcome Trust issued a public statement as follows:
Medical History – entire archive freely available online
The first complete archive of a medical history journal has been deposited into PubMed Central, as part of a £1.25 million programme led by the Wellcome Trust, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). 
In addition to the digitization of the back catalogue, all future issues of Medical History will be made freely available online at the time of publication.
This project supports the Wellcome Trust’s position of supporting open access to scientific literature, and complements the ongoing work to establish a UK PubMed Central. 
(Bold print mine.  See full announcement.)
The editors of Medical History also announced the move to Open Access in a statement in July 2005, and an agreement was signed between the Wellcome Trust and UCL in September 2005 that stipulated that all intellectual property for the journal was vested in UCL, that all management decisions would be taken by the editors at the UCL Wellcome Centre, and that the journal would be completely Open Access.

Following these changes, the entire archive of Medical History, from 1957 to the present, was digitized and put online at PubMedCentral (here), and publication in print and online was handled by the British Medical Journal Group.

Between 2005 and 2011, in accordance with the Wellcome Trust's Open Access policy, each issue of Medical History has appeared in print and online more or less simultaneously.  As the Trust says on its website,
It is a fundamental part of our charitable mission to ensure that the work we fund can be read and utilised by the widest possible audience. We therefore support unrestricted access to the published outputs of research through our open access policy.
Not only were the articles in Medical History published Open Access, but the journal charged no Article Processing Fee (APF).  For both authors and readers, Medical History was free. And authors retained their copyright under a Creative Commons license.  These are the most enlightened policies in the three key issues of modern academic publishing: free authorship, free readership, and authors' retention of copyright.  (A large contemporary literature discusses the new business models underlying these new structures of academic publishing.)

As everyone knows, these policies are critically important for authors on low incomes, including scholars from eastern Europe and many parts of Asia and Africa.  Only these policies guarantee that readers everywhere can benefit from research findings, and that researchers can contribute their own work for open publication and dissemination without encountering a financial barrier.  The Wellcome Trust and the journal's editors broke important new ground in this policy change, adopting the highest ethical and research standards.

2006: EAHMJ partnership
In 2006, Medical History partnered with the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, becoming the official journal of that association, and accepting EAHMH members onto its board of editors (announcement).  In doing so, the journal returned to its roots in one sense, since it had started in 1957 as the organ of a consortium of medical history societies.  At the time of writing (spring 2012), the EAHMH website still presents Medical History as its society journal, stating that,
The EAHMH encourages publication in the journal Medical History. Medical History is a refereed journal devoted to all aspects of the history of medicine and health, with the goal of broadening and deepening the understanding of the field, in the widest sense, by historical studies of the highest quality. It is also the journal of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. The membership of the Editorial Board, which includes senior members of the EAHMH, reflects the commitment to the finest international standards in refereeing of submitted papers and the reviewing of books.
Plans were made in 2009 to bring Medical History and the EAHMH closer together, creating a single subscription to both the journal and to the society.  However, before these plans could be finalized, the Wellcome Centre closed and the management of the journal moved briefly into limbo.

2010: The Wellcome Trust Centre shuts
The chief editors of Medical History were always senior research staff at the Wellcome Historical Medical Library.  That institution changed its name several times, finally becoming the "Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London" in 2000 (announcement by its then Director Roy Porter).

Ten years later, in 2010, in a controversial change of policy, the Wellcome Trust announced the closure of the Wellcome Centre (Wellcome Trust announcement, Times Higher Education reports here, and here, The Telegraph).  The majority of senior staff retired or dispersed to other centres worldwide, and Centre's programs in teaching and research were closed.  A small cross-departmental group remained at UCL, focussing on the history of neuroscience (here).  What would happen to Medical History?

2011: Interregnum
After the closing of the Wellcome Trust Centre, editorial control of the journal passed to UCL staff, including Roger Cooter and Vivian Nutton, who wrote an editorial statement in 2011 that was bullish about the future health of the journal, in spite of the closure of the Centre and the presumed loss of Wellcome Trust funding (Nutton and Cooter 2011 and  Cooter 2011).  Just one more issue of Medical History has appeared in the Open Access PubMedCentral archive since the last statement, the fourth and last for 2011.  At the time of writing (Feb 2012), references to Medical History on the UCL website lead to dead links.

2012: Cambridge University Press takes over
An announcement on 30 Jan 2012 by Cambridge University Press explains that the editorial control of Medical History has moved to the University of York, and that the journal has a new editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, a reviews editor, and an editorial board comprising no fewer than forty-six members, about thirty more editors than the journal has ever had before.  The journal is still supported by the Wellcome Trust, though details are not given.  According to an announcement by Bhattacharya, "the ownership of this journal has passed to Cambridge University Press." 

Cambridge University Press (CUP) is now operating the journal as a Closed Access journal.  If you wish to publish your article Open Access with a Creative Commons license, and retain your own copyright, you must pay $1350 or £850 (here).  CUP requires all non-paying authors to sign a contract transferring their copyright to CUP (contracts here).  The contract permits authors to post a pre-publication, pre-final-editing copy on their own or their university's website.  The terms also state that, "All articles will automatically be deposited in PubMedCentral upon publication" (statement).  But since PubMedCentral is an Open Access, full text website, it is hard to see why an author would pay $1350 if the full text of their article is to appear free in PubMedCentral in any case.  The answer seems to be in the terms of CUP's contract, that suggests that it only the pre-publication version of articles that will appear in PubMedCentral from now on, and not the final published version, as in the past.

At the time of writing (Feb 2012) the January issue of Medical History has not appeared in PubMedCentral.  It will be interesting to see the terms on which it does appear there.

CUP website
PubMedCentral
Cambridge University Press is keen to promote the journal by pointing to its illustrious past, and has a "Highlights of a Decade" page, showcasing selected articles.  But several of these articles, although originally published Open Access and copyrighted by their authors, are presented on CUP's website as being published by CUP, and have been assigned a DOI pointing to CUP's website, and a statement that the article was published online on 07 December 2011.  There is no reference to PubMedCentral, where the articles were actually published online, and much earlier, and where they are still freely downloadable.  CUP did not publish these articles.  The full text of the articles is not available on the CUP website, nor is there any suggestion that these "Highlights of a Decade" can be read freely at PubMedCentral.

Maybe CUP will solve these problems in the future, and come to a more graceful accommodation with the Medical History's Open Access past.

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References and notes
Editors of Medical History:
  • W. J. Bishop, (1957-1961), 5 years.
  • F. N. L. Poynter (1962-1972),  11 years.
  • Edwin Clarke (1973-1979),  7 years.
  • William F. Bynum and Vivian Nutton (1980-1999),  21 years.
  • William F. Bynum and Anne Hardy (2000-2002), 3 years.
  • Harold J. Cook and Anne Hardy (2003- 2010), 8 years.
  • Vivian Nutton and Roger Cooter (2011),
  • Sanjoy Bhattacharya (2012- )
Resources
Declaration of interest
I have published in Medical History.