The cost of Open Access | Exchanges

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-10-23

Summary:

"We all want Open Access – authors, readers, funders and indeed publishers alike. EMBO is keenly interested in the OA question both from a policy viewpoint and as a funder and publisher of high-level biomedical research. EMBO Press publishes four journals, two of which are fully OA and one of which, Molecular Systems Biology, was one of the first OA journals to be founded. MSB is currently the highest Impact Factor OA journal (for whatever that metric is worth). The other two journals offer OA as an option at publication and as a default after one year ... Be that as it may, almost everyone in principle favors OA – but at what cost? One fundamental characteristic of Article Publication Charge (APC)-based models is that a journal’s income is directly proportional to the number of papers it publishes. This is not a big issue for journals with limited editorial and production overheads and high acceptance rates, but it is a serious issue for highly selective journals (the four EMBO Press publications all have acceptance rates around 10%). The editorial overhead to administer the efficient, fair and informed editorial process cultivated at EMBO Press is very high, yet this cost has to be shouldered by only one tenth of the submitting authors – i.e. those we publish. The result is that OA at EMBO has to cost much more than the 2,000 US$ limit currently considered reasonable by most researchers, institutions and funders.  How can we close the gap on this cost differential? Cutting corners is not an option for us. In fact, we are heavily investing in the editorial process to allow us to publish papers fit for an online world – papers that are proper research tools, not merely online copies of printed papers. Furthermore, we are investing in systematic pre-publication ethics screens to fulfill what we see as an obligation for journals to resolve or flag up issues at the last checkpoint before publication ..."

Link:

http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2014/10/23/the-cost-of-open-access/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.gold oa.fees oa.sustainability oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.journals oa.economics_of

Date tagged:

10/23/2014, 11:16

Date published:

10/23/2014, 07:16