When We Publish: Accuracy and Quality Control in the Time of Open Access | Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology

"Many aspects of publishing are being fiercely discussed. If open-access policies make sense to remove barriers to information, especially publicly funded science, then straying from a subscription-based model raises other questions. Who pays for the editorial work that a journal puts into publishing a manuscript? This includes the salaries of editors and editorial staff who handle each submission up through text and figure checks, manuscript layout, and final production. Neither authors nor reviewers are paid for their services and contributions. Indeed, authors often have to pay hefty publication fees to have their research published, shifting the subsistence burden to the scientists in the form of author charges. Leading journals produced by some for-profit companies charge many thousands of dollars. For example, the Springer publication house charges $11,690 for immediate open-access publication in its premier journal Nature and Elsevier charges $9,900 to publish in Cell. This shifts the barrier from access-to-read to access-to-publish. The demand by funders and the public to provide open-access dissemination of research results becomes a special financial burden for journals that are published by nonprofit scientific societies or scientific publishers. Some of these already rely heavily on expert volunteers from the scientific community to act as editors to keep the editorial cost low, but publishing fees must still be recovered from either subscriptions or authors, making it difficult for truly grassroots journals to be competitive. One way to deal with this pressure is to have wealthy backers. In the case of the open-access journal eLife, for example, substantial funding is provided by the Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Society, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This allows the journal to charge a reasonable $2,000 for publication. Without this type of generous backing, nonprofit organizations are struggling to keep the cost of immediate open access low for their authors. For example, the American Society for Cell Biology's open access charge for publication in Molecular Biology of the Cell is $3,396 (members) or $3,995 (nonmembers), the Rockefeller Press Journal of Cell Biology costs $6,000, and the Cold Spring Harbor Press Genes & Development is priced at $5,200. The Annual Reviews journals are pioneering a different approach, called Subscribe to Open (S2O). Instead of relying on authors to carry the burden of publishing costs, S2O places them on institutions. This is an evolution of the traditional subscription model in that libraries play a central role. It might be considered an honors system which trusts that libraries that have purchased subscriptions to the journal in the past, will continue to do so, raising the funds that allow the entire journal to be open for everyone. This year, the company anticipates that all 51 Annual Reviews volumes, including this volume of the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, will participate in the S2O model. Clearly, while access to much research is now freely accessible for all, the financial challenges have not yet been entirely solved...."