What would a Gold-OA world look like? Three issues briefly considered | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-01

Summary:

"What would the world look like if, as proposed by the Max Planck Institute, the scholarly world flipped from being dominated by subscriptions to Gold open access? I think there are three things to say. First, incentives. A concern is sometimes expressed that when publishers are paid per paper published, they will have an incentive to want more papers to be published. Would this exacerbate the existing publish-or-perish culture where we are flooded by quantity of publications, sometimes at the expense of quality? ... Second, costs. I sometimes hear a concern is that a flip to Gold OA would create an environment where funds are tied up, and resources are not sufficient of fund new and innovative journals ... Third, markets. This one is a question, and I think it’s crucial for the prospects of a Gold-OA ecosystem: will we get an efficient market in APCs? If we do, then prices will be forced down until they are very close to costs — which publishers like Hindawi, Ubiquity Press and PeerJ have shown can be in the $400-500 range, almost literally an order of magnitude less than the world presently pays for publication. But if no true market emerges, prices will not fall — indeed publishers may have the leverage to raise APCs at rates greater than inflation, as they have been doing for subscriptions ..."

Link:

http://svpow.com/2016/04/01/what-would-a-gold-oa-world-look-like-three-issues-briefly-considered/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.gold oa.conversions oa.economics_of oa.journals

Date tagged:

04/01/2016, 09:50

Date published:

04/01/2016, 05:50