Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, April 22, 2006

More arrows miss the target

Steven E. Eckert, “Open Access” to Scientific Literature, The International Journal of Oral & Maxillofacial Implants, March/April 2006. An editorial. Excerpt:
In an OA system the scientific literature is made available to any reader free of charge while the literature is maintained by the publisher. Although this sounds like a great idea on the surface, this business model has no obvious revenue stream to support the expenses of publication and literature maintenance. This issue of revenue is addressed in most OA proposals by having the author pay for manuscript management through the peer review system. The figure that is mentioned most often is US $3,000 per manuscript, and the assumption is that this charge will be made for every submitted manuscript. Since most peer-reviewed journals reject more articles than they accept, an “author pays” system could result in major up-front costs to authors who may never see their material published....The assumption is that the OA approach maintains the current method of peer review. Unfortunately, this may not be the case for all OA articles, and distinguishing peer-reviewed articles from non–peer-reviewed articles might be impossible. If peer review were eliminated, the system would change from open access to open forum....

Comment. This editorial is full of misunderstandings that would have been caught if it had been subject to peer review. (1) The majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees at all. (2) The majority of OA journals that do charge author-side fees charge substantially less than $3,000. (3) The majority of OA journals charging fees only charge for accepted papers. Authors of rejected work pay nothing. (4) It's no harder to tell when OA literature has been peer-reviewed than it is for non-OA literature. Moreover, all the major OA definitions and declarations call for OA to peer-reviewed literature, not for the bypassing of peer review. BTW, as of today the DOAJ lists 2,202 peer-reviewed OA journals.