Thoughts Arguments and Rants » Blog Archive » How to Make Your Journal Open Access in One Easy Step

"Imagine that a prominent journal, let’s call it The Philosophy Journal, has a well functioning, but subscription only, website. As per usual for well run journals, subscribers can download a PDF of any article they want, and it looks exactly like the printed version that subscribers can read on paper. It also lets non-subscribers see some information, such as the bibliographic information, the abstract, and perhaps the first page. Now imagine this journal adds another feature to the part of the website available to everyone. It uploads the final version of the paper submitted by the author(s), in whatever form the paper was submitted in. It also puts these papers in a place they can be properly indexed by the appropriate crawlers. In that way, anyone in the world could read the papers in the journals. But to see them in the polished final form, and certainly to track down page numbers for citation purposes, you’d have to be a subscriber. Two questions about this thought experiment. Would The Philosophy Journal now be an open access journal? Would adding these features to its website cause subscribers, especially library subscribers, to unsubscribe from The Philosophy Journal? I’m tempted to say the answers are ‘yes, more or less’ and ‘no, or at least not many’. It wouldn’t be the optimal form of open access, a la Philosophers’ Imprint or Semantics and Pragmatics, but it would be much better than nothing. In particular, it would promote what I think are the two big benefits of open access in philosophy: making leading work available to people at universities that do not (or cannot) subscribe to the best journals, and making this work available to journalists, magazine writers and the like who are interested in philosophy, but do not have access to university libraries. And at least for prominent journals, I don’t think this would be sufficient grounds for unsubscribing. A library would still prefer to have good journals in archival formats (and a repository of self-submitted papers is not such a format), and it is important for researchers to be able to properly cite papers. I’m far from 100% certain of this, but I suspect it wouldn’t cost a lot. So there you have it – a low cost means of being sorta kinda open access. I’m grateful to Kai von Fintel for suggesting this model. But I’d be interested in hearing views on its prospects and flaws."