Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
'author pays' model and back to a subscription model because they have
been unable to sustain their operation on the basis of author pays (for
example,
Journal of Clinical Investigation
).
OA publishing has advantages in that it provides a tangible revenue
stream for publishers to pay for the cost of certification and
dissemination, and it allows for the immediate dissemination of the
Version of Record to anyone with an internet connection. However,
there are concerns regarding the reliable and sustainable funding of
author-side payment OA publishing, particularly in academic
disciplines where research funding is relatively poor. The absolute, per
article cost of publishing is likely to be broadly the same irrespective of
discipline; current studies estimate this at around £3000 per paper
(RIN, 2008; JISC, 2009). While this amounts to a modest and
affordable 1-2% of research budgets in relatively well funded
disciplines like biomedicine, it represents a much greater proportion of
the research budget in disciplines like mathematics and ecology, where
it will be more that 100% of current research budgets.
Clearly, if 'author pays' OA is to become the dominant economic
model of scholarly publishing, then the funding mechanisms for the
dissemination of research need to change dramatically. I hope that this
becomes the case. Even so, author-side payment OA publishing is
already mainstream and will continue to gain popularity in some
disciplines.
Manuscript archiving (green OA)
Proponents of manuscript archiving (self-archiving or 'green' OA) see a
mechanism by which authors can act to make all research immediately
OA without either authors having to pay publication fees to journals or
readers having to purchase access via a subscription. All that is required
is online repositories - either institutionally based repositories or subject
repositories - and the willingness of authors to deposit their
manuscripts (see Ware (2004) for a discussion of the role of repositories).
Most publishers would agree that the outputs of publicly funded
research should be freely available to the public, but would also point
out that these 'outputs' are the Author Manuscript as submitted to the
journal and before the publisher has added value in terms of quality
assessment, association with the journal brand, addition of functionality
