Open access dilemmas | Brian's comments

"One model, called gold OA, involves the publisher making articles free online immediately on publication. However, commercial publishers want to make money, naturally enough, so they are adopting various methods. The most common is to require authors, or their institutions, to pay a fee for gold OA. This might be US$3000 or so. It’s a disincentive for anyone who does not have institutional support. Another model, called green OA, involves authors putting the final pre-publication versions of their articles online, usually in an institutional repository. This gives access, but for those who want to obtain the publisher’s pdf version, access through a library is usually required. The trouble with these models is that the large commercial publishers are still extracting super-profits due to their monopoly control. The reason is that the market for academic journals is not truly competitive.  In principle, academic authors could choose to publish wherever they like. If journal A is slow and expensive, then go to journal B that is quick and provides free gold OA. The trouble is that journals have reputations, and academics are judged as much or more by where they publish as by the quality of their articles. You can write brilliant articles but if you publish them in low-status journals, your work will not be treated as seriously by fellow academics. Most of the new OA journals have not had sufficient time to develop reputations ... This emphasis on the status of outlets is exacerbated by some organisational, disciplinary or national research evaluation schemes. The government scheme called Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initially provided a rating of scholarly journals (A*, A, B, C and non-ranked), and universities were assessed based on outputs using these ratings. The system had the perverse effect of penalising publication in lower-rated journals. A scholar who published four articles in A* journals helped the university’s score more than one who published four articles in A* journals plus four more in C journals. Although the journal ratings were later withdrawn, they continue to play a post-death role within universities: academics going for promotion often identify the 'former ERA rating' of the journals in which they have been published. Few bother to identify the OA status of the journals ... I obtained a taste of the developments and complexities in this area by reading a lengthy document titled Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review. It was written by Giancarlo F. Frosio for a British research centre with the acronym CREATe; he has since moved to Stanford Law School. Open Access Publishing is far more than a literature review, being instead an impressive book-length discourse and state-of-the-art assessment of OA ..."