John Ewing, 'Open access' will not be open to everyone, Nature, October 9, 2003 (accessible only to subscribers). A letter to the editor in response to the Declan Butler article in the same issue (see the previous entry). Excerpt: "Each publication model --subscription-based or author-supported-- has trade-offs, but they are not symmetric trade-offs. When a scientist doesn't have a subscription, he or she can nonetheless get information about the article....When a scientist doesn't have the funds to publish an article, the article does not appear....That’s more than an inconvenience."
(PS: Here's a short reply to Ewing's objection. First, PLoS, BMC, and other open-access journal publishers waive their processing fees in cases of economic hardship. Second, BMC offers institutional memberships, which are roughly equivalent to prepaid processing fees at a discounted price. We don't know yet whether PLoS will follow suit. Third, as Declan Butler noted, many foundations that fund research are willing to pay these fees for their grant recipients. They are willing to consider the cost of open-access dissemination to be part of the cost of research. Fourth, while some of these solutions will not work in disciplines that are not as well-funded as medicine (in Ewing's field of mathematics, for example, or mine, philosophy), that is no objection to using these solutions in the fields where they do work. The success of this business model in biomedicine is progress for biomedicine, and does not imply that the same model will be adopted without modification in (say) mathematics or philosophy. Sixth, when foundations do not pay these fees, universities can. Ewing notes that many universities cannot afford to do so, which is certainly true today. But he doesn't note that, if open access spreads, then every university will realize large savings from the cancellation, conversion, or demise of expensive subscription-based journals. The natural use for this savings is to support the less expensive and more beneficial open-access model of archiving and publication that made it possible. Finally, there are other ways to bring about open access to research articles that do not depend on having research grants, wealthy employers, or windfall savings in the library budget. The most important is eprint archiving, which authors can do on their own, and ought to do, right now.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/08/2003 06:05:00 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.
