If you had free online access to all of the content of this Journal, would you pay for a subscription? ...
Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for a printed copy, costs are going up, and the era of personal journal subscriptions may be ending....
Subscription fees pay for production and distribution, salaries of our excellent editorial staff..., support of our Secondary School Chemistry Section, technical expertise..., and creating special issues.... We are non-profit, so all of the fees are used to make the JCE as good as it can be. Without subscriptions, this would be a very different (perhaps nonexistent) Journal....
Proponents of open access journals...often quote Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) as saying, “information wants to be free”...
Proponents of open access argue that because the government pays for research through grants, the research should be published where all taxpayers can read and use it. This assumes that everything published is the result of government-supported research....
Of course [our staff, paid with subscription revenue] produces a higher quality product, but is that what is really wanted today? ...Is this Journal barking up the wrong tree by trying to achieve the highest quality product? ...
Comment. Moore evidently assumes that OA journals have no revenue and cannot be high in quality. His explicit claims are equally uninformed. I don't know a single proponent of OA journals who has quoted Stuart Brand. (Moore is resting on a stereotype here.) And I don't know a single proponent of OA who believes that the case for OA to publicly-funded research implies that all research is publicly funded. These careless assertions would not survive peer review.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/22/2008 12:59:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
