Scientific publishing in the times of open access

"The push for 'Open Access' publications may have captured the largest mindshare of librarians and policy-makers, yet other aspects may turn out to become even more important in the years to come. The Open Access movement derives its strength from its unquestionable idealism. Given that the prime purpose of science is to advance the knowledge of mankind, shouldn’t all mankind be made privy to such knowledge, directly, with no strings attached, and – most importantly – without having to pay for it? The moral justification for Open Access becomes all the more compelling when one considers that most research (including, notably, much of the research carried out at private companies) is funded by the tax-paying public. While the big publishing houses have initially resisted, and often derided, the propositions of the Open Access movement, the validity of the model is now almost universally ­accepted ... What is more rarely discussed, however, is the darker side of the Open Access model (at least as it is generally practiced today). You see, Open Access does not magically make the costs of publishing a journal disappear. What it does, instead, is to shift the cost of publishing from the readers to the authors, who are typically requested to pay a fee for seeing their paper published. In truth, this 'dirty little secret' of Open Access publishing creates a conflict of interest which is virtually impossible to resolve: the more scientific papers get published, the higher the revenues of the publisher. Consequently, human nature being what it is, any fledgling (or struggling) journal may feel tempted to subordinate the scientific soundness of any submitted manuscript to the harsh pressure of economic realities. This conflict of interests is intrinsic to the ­author-pays model and, of course, this is the reason why a plethora of Open Access pseudopublishers have opened shop, whose business models range from the slightly malodorous to the blatantly fraudulent. The names of these so-called 'science publishers' are well known to the scientific community, whose inboxes are regularly flooded by their email spam campaigns ..."