Hello Miguel and everybody,
I am a researcher at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and
work in the area of knowledge marketplaces and ontology-based systems.
First, let me say that I highly appreciate Miltiadis' initiative. The
IS community seems to be a bit slow in adopting Open Access mind sets
that are already well established in research areas such as Physics
and Medicine.
Let me give some notes on my experience with online and print
journals. At our institute (media and communications management -
www.mcm.unisg.ch) we are hosting two journals (Electronic Markets and
Journal on Media Management). The EM Journal started in 1991 and the
JMM in 1999 as a print and online journal. We implemented everything
by ourselves - first based on Lotus Notes and now on PHP/mySQL.
Counting everything together, i.e. software, editorial work and
marketing, we invested several million Euros (no joke!). As a result
the EM Journal is now ranked 3rd regarding e-commerce research
world-wide.
A decision we had to make quite early for the EM Journal was how to
deal with a high-quality print journal. Therefore we made a joint
venture with Routledge in 1999 and recently with Erlbaum as well for
the JMM. The good thing was that we disposed of all printing issues.
The bad thing was and still is that we received little financial
returns but still have to pay our editors and the technical
infrastructure of the overall journal web site and online management.
Publishers do more or less nothing for growing a journal. Now that the
Open Access initiative is gaining momentum, we might have decided for
a different business model.

Therefore I fully agree with Miguels hint that the journal management
has to be financed. Additionally I learned that it is important to
decide on a thoroughly designed business model from the beginning on.
Some questions on the design of an Open Access journal that
immediately poped-up to my mind are:
- Shall it become journal with "ranking quality"?
- Shall it be an online journal or a hybrid journal?
- Who will be the editor-in-chief?
- Who will be the initial board member?
- Which are the important online networks to connect with?

I believe that a good online journal can be managed by a really
dedicated 50%-editor, a dedicated editor-in-chief and an appropriate
intial board. If not done by the editor-in-chief herself, the editor
costs are permanent costs which leads to the question how is this
resource paid from the very first day on but also in the years
thereafter. Continuity is key!
These are some initial thoughts on this topic.

many greetings

Wolfgang

--- In open-research-society@yahoogroups.com, "masicilia"
<msicilia@u...> wrote:
> Dear all and dear Christian,
>
> I completely agree that paper publication must not be a cause of
> delays and restrictions on number of pages. In fact, the plan I
> briefly described was based on quick digital publication, with the
> printed versions coming afterwards as a secondary element.
>
> The "printing on demand" is a nice concept, except that many
printing
> services require a minimum order of 5-10 copies, but this is
probably
> not a big problem.
> Just to continue with the example I commented you, if we adhere to
> such "printing on demand", the fees result as follow:
> - Fee for EB members: About 20 Euros/year
> - Fee for paper published: About 10 euros
> - Printed copies: about 20 Euros.
>
> And a point I didn't mention is that the economic model *scales*. I
> suppose that the initiative of this Open-Research Society is to
host
> *many* journals as the BMC or PLOS (if I am wrong, please
Miltiadis,
> correct me :-)) so that the excedent in funding from one can be
used
> for other. However, I still think that the fee model is required,
> since the cost of management of the digital journals (specially for
> collections or journals) must be paid somewhat to guarantee
> continuity!.
>
> Regards,
> Miguel Angel
>
> --- In open-research-society@yahoogroups.com, "Christian Wagner"
> <christian@w...> wrote:
> > I too agree that a model with author fees is restrictive for the
> > publication of research. I would even go further and suggest
that
> any
> > "paper based" journal model stiffles research publication. In
paper
> > based journals, the marginal cost for every page printed is
> considered
> > and so an artifical scarcity is produced, resulting in a
"pipeline"
> > and publication delays.
> >
> > An open research model should better align itself with the
> publication
> > models of slashdot.org or kuro5hin.org, both of which have peer
> > review, yet fast publication, and large readership. Both are
> > electronic publication models.
> >
> > I would consider an alternate paper based model, where the
> publication
> > is essentially electronic, but authors could request (at their
> cost) a
> > "bound journal issue" (printing on demand) so that they can give
it
> to
> > their Dean at the time of tenure decisions.
> >
> > If you have not seen it, the University of British Columbia
offers a
> > free software for the management of electronic journals. You can
> find
> > it at http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ and it runs on a PhP/MySQL platform
> > (either with Linux/Apache or with Windows + web server).