Open Access to Scientific Publications | February 2010 | Communications of the ACM

“In his July 2009 Communications editor's letter "Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?", editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi addressed the question of open access to this magazine and to ACM publications in general... In this column, I take a look at commercial and Open Access publishing, and at the role that professional societies such as ACM can play in this evolving world... Scientific publishing is a profitable business: at more than 30%, the operating profit margins of major commercial publishers are one of the highest across all businesses.a A major consequence has been a massive concentration of commercial editors of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publications, with one giant (Elsevier) and a few big players (Springer, Thomson, Wiley). This concentration has coincided with sharp increases in subscription rates, and has generated razor-sharp business practices whereby, for example, publishers sell subscriptions to a bundle of titles that typically contain one or two good journals among a set of second-tier ones. The quality of a journal is typically measured by its impact factor... impact factors can be, and are, manipulated: Commercial publishers ask their editors-in-chief to "encourage" authors of accepted papers to include references to their journalls... Since Open Access needs funding, where can it come from?c ...author charges (or publication fees)... The most prominent Open Access publisher, the Public Library of Science (PLOS), is a nonprofit organization that has received several million dollars in donations. Yet it charges between $1,350 and $2,900 per paper, depending on the journal.d In fact, many in the profession estimate that to be sustainable, the author-pay model will need to charge up to $5,000–$8,000 per publication.... In fact, those who benefit the most from this model are... the big pharmaceutical labs and the tech firms... With author-pay, research will pay so that industry can get their results for free... In 2003, Donald Knuth, editor of Journal of Algorithms, wrote a long letterh to his editorial board explaining that the price per page of the journal had more than doubled since it had been acquired by Elsevier, while it had stayed stable over the previous period, when it was published by Academic Press. This led to a mass resignation of the board and the rebirth of the journal as ACM Transactions on Algorithms... First, scientific publications can be affordable. The pricing of the ACM Digital Library is extremely low, even compared to other societies and nonprofit organizations. This is still not enough. The pricing model is adequate for the academic and industry audience but not for dissemination toward the public at large... Many publishers, including ACM, allow their authors to publish copies of their articles on their personal Web page or on their institutional repository... I believe switching to a licensing model such as Creative Commons could be beneficial...”