Does the emergence of new publishing models make antitrust concerns irrelevant?
• The IAA partner organizations have been leaders in actively exploring and promoting alternatives to current publishing models, including open access journals and open archives. Open access journals are peer-reviewed journals whose content is made freely available on the Internet upon publication for use by anyone anywhere for any purpose as long as the authors are properly acknowledged. Open archives are digital infrastructure intended to provide online access to and preservation of the intellectual assets of an institution or a discipline. • It is not clear how long it will take for these new models to replace the current system. Moreover, it is possible that if commercial companies were to adopt an open access model where authors rather than libraries paid, mergers could still be an issue. A very large company that owned many key open access journals in a given field could raise the fees charged to authors or their institutions.
