I believe Stevan has said most of what is needed to answer your message.
For my part, I will focus on OA journals and would like to underscore the fact
that this particular way to move to open access will require some
concertation among a variety of ploayers. It is not simply a matter of an
author dealing with the business plan of an OA journal; libraries are saing
money with OA journals and could perhaps be persuaded to put back some of
those savings in the publishing circuit by contributing to institutional
access deals with such publications. Alternatively, universities as a whole
or research centres could explore doing the same. Finally, agencies that
allocate research grants can certainly build policies favouring the support
of publishing costs, especially in the case of OA journals. This is a trend
which seems to be growing at this point in history: the Hughes Foundation,
the Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Gesellschaft, among others, have moved
ahead on this front.
In short, the situation where a lonely author is left with no alternative but
to shell out several hundred dollars or even 1500 dollars in the case of PLoS
is not supposed to be the typical or even minority case. Most people I talk
to envision this case as a rare one that ultimtely ought to disappear. And,
indeed, a variety of mechanisms and institutions are moving to provide funds
for the support of these new publishing models. One can expect to see this
movement accelerate everywhere in the next couple of years
Best wishes,
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le 6 Février 2004 10:05, Suhail A. Rahman a écrit :
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 12:20:25 -0500, Albert Henderson wrote:
> > The author-pays open access ideal, which delivers
> > nothing, has been fostered by too many non-
> > researchers whose stated goal is the elimination of
> > publishers and library costs.
>
> The principles propounded for author charged open access sounded quite
> promising initially and I was the first author to send a manuscript to, and
> which was published (free) in, BMC Nuclear Medicine. However my support
> for author charged open access has waned since then and now I strongly
> believe that author charged open access should be discontinued. The reason
> is quite simple. As authors, even from so called affluent countries, (I am
> in Kuwait) research costs billed to authors cannot be borne as in many
> countries, unlike in the West, there is no organized system of
> institutional support for rersearch. Open Access will then be limited to
> either the "rich" researchers, or those backed by an institutional system.
> For the majority of clinicians, who do high quality research on their own,
> the added publication costs of open access will be a major stumbling block
> to research output.
>
> I would suggest a system like that of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology
> & Metabolism as the way to go. All research after 1 year of publication
> becomes open access. That within 1 year is not open access. There are no
> author fees. This should be the face of open access, a way out for both
> authors and researchers. Myself and my colleagues have decided never to
> send a manuscript to author charged open access again (unless of course in
> the rare instance of someone turning up to pay for it).
>
> I look forward to the responses generated by this message
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur
Littérature comparée, Université de Montréal
Tél. : 1-514-343-6208
Fax : 1-514-343-2211
Received on Fri Feb 06 2004 - 18:07:39 GMT