Open and Shut?: Public Library of Science’s Cameron Neylon on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Use the link to access the interview.  An excerpt from the introduction reads as follows: " ... There can also be little doubt that the very considerable mindshare Open Access has gained in recent years owes a great deal to the success of PLOS. Is PLOS’ success evidence that the research community can and should take back ownership of the scholarly communication process? To answer that we might want to ask two further questions. First, is the publishing model pioneered by PLOS a suitable and optimal way of communicating research in the age of the Internet? More specifically, is PLOS ONE as radical and forward-thinking as PLOS’ admirers claim it to be? Second, can the author-pays OA model inherent to the PLOS project solve the intractable affordability problem (referred to historically as the 'serials crisis') that has dogged the research community for several decades now? In other words, will author-pays Gold OA prove a less expensive way of communicating research than subscription publishing? On the first question, Kent Anderson for one is sceptical, believing that PLOS lost its way early on. As he put it in 2010, 'Fiery rhetoric, impatient academic leadership, the kind of arrogance possibly concealing a grand idea — all were present at PLoS’ inception. It was an entrance ripe with portent and peril. Traditional publishers were a bit nervous and certainly watchful. Then, very quickly, PLoS underwhelmed — it went old school, publishing a good traditional journal initially and then worrying about traditional publisher concerns like marketing, impact factor, author relations, and, of course, the bottom line. PLoS fell so quickly into the traditional journal traps, from getting a provisional impact factor in order to attract better papers to shipping free print copies during its introductory period to dealing with staff turmoil, it soon looked less radical than many traditional publishers did at the time.' Anderson concluded, 'Within a few years, PLoS had become just another publisher.'  But it is our second question that is surely the key one. Namely, will the author-pays Gold OA model that PLOS adopted, and for which it has tirelessly advocated, prove any more cost-effective than the traditional subscription system?  This is an important question not least because many (if not most) of those who joined the OA movement in the early days (particularly librarians) did so in the belief that it would reduce the costs of scholarly publishing, and so resolve the affordability problem that has plagued the research community for so long.  Today the sceptics tend not to be publishers, but researchers, who cannot understand why it costs so much to publish in an OA journal. Specifically, they tend to ask how PLOS ONE can justify charging $1,350 for providing a service that consists of little more than organising (not itsself undertaking) a simplified form of peer review and then hosting the paper online.  (PLOS’ flagship journals charge $2,900 per paper, and legacy publishers who offer a Hybrid OA option charge $3,000 or more per paper).  One is therefore bound to wonder whether PLOS is really an example of the research community taking back ownership of scholarly communication, or whether (as Anderson claims) it has simply become another publisher, a publisher moreover that has pioneered a new publishing model apparently so profitable that other publishers are rushing to clone it. Some might certainly question whether this is a suitable and optimal way of communicating research in the age of the Internet ... But long as PLOS continues to increase the amount of research that is freely available does that really matter? If the cost of scholarly communication continues to be an insupportable burden on the research community then presumably it does matter. If, on the other hand, what Neylon says below is correct, then perhaps it does not. Because Neylon implies that who runs a publishing operation, or how they run it, is not the key factor. What is important is the nature of the market in which that publisher trades. And what is significant about the PLOS-style author-pays OA model, he suggests, is that it makes the publishing market more price sensitive.  How come? In the traditional subscription market intermediary librarians buy journal subscriptions (usually by means of the infamous 'Big Deal') on behalf of researchers. While libraries are very concerned about costs, researchers generally are not. Yet it is the researchers