The world's leading STM publisher, Elsevier, announced this month that it will offer authors the chance to make their articles freely available for a fee. Six journals in physics will offer the option, including Nuclear Physics A, Nuclear Physics B, Nuclear Physics B, Proceedings Supplements, Nuclear Instruments and Methods A, Physics Letters B, and Astroparticle Physics. Elsevier officials say that 30 more journals across other fields also will offer this option in the coming months. The author charge for article sponsorship is $3000, excluding taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges. In addition, the articles must be accessed through Elsevier's ScienceDirect. With the move, Elsevier now joins its competitors, including Springer and Blackwell, in offering authors a variation on open access, if not open access, at a cost higher than that charged by subsidized OA providers like the Public Library of Science.
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.
