Randy Dotinga, Open-Access Journals Flourish, Wired News, April 11, 2005. Excerpt: 'But if the researchers pay, doesn't it turn journals into servants to authors, like the vanity-press publishers who publish anything for the right price? "In our capitalist society, one of our basic tenets is who pays the fiddler calls the tune," said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, at the national meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on April 1. It's possible, Drazen said, that an open-access journal would find itself in deep financial trouble and loosen its standards about the papers it accepts. The researchers, possibly from drug companies, will be "more likely to get their paper published because they can afford to get their paper published, and that's exactly the wrong reason."...As for the vanity-press charge, [Gavin] Yamey [senior editor at PLOS Medicine] said his company makes exceptions for authors who can't pay. Editors aren't in the loop on those decisions, however, "so that cannot influence our decisions on which papers to publish."'
(PS: Dotinga gives a lot of space to the objection that OA journals corrupt peer review and very little space to the PLoS rebuttal. There's a lot more that can be said to answer this canard, apart from the fact that only 47% of OA journals even charge author-side fees.)
Update. Wired has published two short letters to the editor on Dotinga's article, one from Patrick Cates and one from Stevan Harnad. Both correct misimpressions left by Dotinga and strengthen the case for OA.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/11/2005 01:49:00 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.
