Open Access – what is the economic model? | Girl, Interrupting

“I just had my first Open Access paper accepted to a bona fide Open Access Journal – PLOS One.  On the plus side, I had really good and thoughtful reviews. They were sent (as requested) to three experts in the field – a new field for me – and the referees comments for the most part were positive and helpful. I am particularly pleased about having a paper in PLOS (sorry oops now it’s PLOS) One because its mostly ‘biology’ and I don’t really ‘do’ Biology – in that sense that my work isn’t universally classified as ‘biology’. Personally I don’t think those classifications always work very well but that is another story. I, like Athene Donald, work somewhere at this fuzzy cross section where – ‘Physics meets Biology’ – interdisciplinary and all that – but most Biology journals may not think so. PLOS ONE gave me a chance though and for that I am pleased. I kinda feel like I am growing up, or at least maybe my  science is – and that makes me happy.  On the down side – the whole process of review, etc for PLOS took far more time than the journals I normally publish in (which are physics and chemistry journals mostly). Which is sort of OK but not what it says on the tin. That is PLOS: accelerating the publication of peer-reviewed science seems not really true to me from my experience.I would feel a bit happier about it if it was because the reviewers were slow (reviewers just can be slow – I am guilty of this myself), but it wasn’t. It took about 3 weeks for PLOS to assign us an Editor in the first place – which seems a long time to me. The reviews themselves were pretty quick (according to the website) but it took about another 2 weeks for the editor to send them along. We didn’t have major changes to address and we did address the changes rather quickly (1 and 1/2 weeks) but it all seemed a bit sluggish to me...  On the other plus side the PLOS staff were pretty polite to my what-is-happening-with-my-manuscriptplease, please let me know emails.  Today I got my bill though $1350 – which I think its a fair enough price to pay for open access and I don’t mind paying it because I am funded (at the moment). There is also a discount for those with limited funds and for institutions who have *signed* up for PLOS somehow (my institution hasn’t).  If (or maybe when) my funds were less I wouldn’t want to pay and in fact I think this would likely make me not choose PLOS in the first place. I would just go with what I knew. If I had something I wanted to get out faster I would likely choose another journal as well and this made me well a bit sad. What I do know is that I can submit papers to certain places and likely as not it would be faster. I am not talking Nature or one of the big boys but something reliable. And then I wouldn’t even have to dp my own editing, or pay. What is not to love?  I don’t really actually feel like this, I think publishing in PLOS ONE is a good thing and I am so pleased about our reviews and being in a new venue, I think it is decidedly worth it. A whole host of my colleagues I have talked to Open Access don’t feel it is worth it and some of them have even published in PLOS. So how is PLOS (and open access in general) going to cope with this? How does Open Access cope with this? Who is going to pay for it? This is the part I have the hardest time with, who is going to pay?  I don’t mind paying but what about those who do? Do we add it to grant budgets? There is precious little budget for research anyway. Does the government pay into PLOS?  How can we come up with the best economic model for Open access? This is what I want to know as I think it is an easy deterent for most folks to say – forget it, go with what you know, copy editing and you don’t even have to pay.”