Britain’s Royal Society dipped a cautious toe into the waters of open access publishing this week, allowing authors whose papers are accepted by any of its seven journals to pay a fee and have their work made freely available on the web.
The society’s officials have expressed serious doubts about open access on several occasions in the past. Although they are still concerned by a lack of evidence about the sustainability of the model, they hope the experiment will ultimately be a success, spokesman Bob Ward told The Scientist. “It’s a toe in the water, but it’s not based on an expectation that it will fail -- we expect that it will succeed,” he said. “We are also hoping that this will allow us to gather some evidence that the whole sector can use.”...
Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, also welcomed the society’s decision to try out a “hybrid” model -- combining open access with the traditional publishing system. “The Royal Society is trying the hybrid model for the right reasons,” he said in his blog, “to see how well it works, to answer critics, and to measure the demand.” But Suber said the plan was also flawed, pointing out that the society will not waive its fees in cases of economic hardship, will not apparently let authors choosing the new option retain copyright, and will not apparently deposit its open access articles in a repository.
The fees for the new service are higher than those charged by open access publishers. Authors who choose to pay to make their papers immediately available on the web will be charged £200 ($370) per journal page for Proceedings A, Phil Trans A, and Notes and Records, or £300 ($550) per journal page for Proceedings B, Phil Trans B, Biology Letters, and Interface. For a 10-page article like [Neil] Roach’s [the first paper published under the RS's new OA program], that adds up to £3000 ($5500). This is more than double the fees at US open access publisher Public Library of Science, which charges up to $2,500 per article for its flagship journals.
Ward said the fee was an accurate reflection of the cost of publishing a paper. “People need to understand the cost of doing this,” he said. Still, the society remains concerned that the costs of open access publishing will be prohibitive for some researchers, he noted.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/22/2006 03:55:00 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.
