Fair Open Access Principles – Filling a much-needed gap

"I [Mark Wilson] have been working for the last 18 months with a group of talented and committed people to accelerate conversion of subscription journals to open access. There are many barriers, and many pitfalls. For example, so-called “predatory” open access journals that take authors’ money and provide no quality control have gained considerable publicity and must be avoided. Large, inefficent and greedy commercial publishers have attempted to “double-dip” by introducing Hybrid OA. Otherwise well-run open access journals still have high publication charges. Our aim is to avoid these problems by retaining community control of journals and adhering to high ethical standards. Here is a list of our basic principles, based on the original version introduced by LingOA. This list was developed after extensive discussion and some consultation with other OA advocates such as Peter Suber and Marie Farge. We hope it will be useful in delineating what we see as the ideal way to publish journals. This is not to say that all other ways are necessarily “unfair”, of course, although some of them clearly are! ..."