Is the U of MN Authors Addendum a threat to the viability of non-profit scholarly society journals?
No, probably not. There is as yet no evidence that publishing revenues are declining or at risk, even with the rapidly growing number of open access policies and amount of publicly available scholarship. Further, the policy contains a key provision that protects journals and the peer review process: for those journals that do not already allow open access to articles within six months of publication, the policy assumes, and faculty may specifically request, a delay of up to six months after publication and before the university places any articles in a public repository. Immediate access continues to be through the published journal. In some disciplines, freely accessible online archives have proven to be a supplement to journal readership, not a replacement for it. In physics, for example, where nearly 100% of new articles are freely available from birth in the arXiv open-access repository, subscription-based journals have continued to thrive. The American Physical Society and the Ins
