Open-access journals: a perspective from within

"There’s an ongoing debate in the world of academic publishing about whether the public should be allowed open access to research publications we all pay for in the first place...  I thought (as a research physicist and taxpayer) it might be helpful to point out a few seemingly overlooked aspects to add to the discussion... The latest episode in the ongoing saga is a deal brokered by the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) to make all particle physics papers open access.  The deal means journal subscription fees paid by university libraries would be directed towards 12 selected journals in return for public access to those journals. SCOAP³ claims the deal will result in more than 90% of particle physics papers being available for everyone.  An immediate query I have is whether this '90%' conclusion takes into account any push to publish in these (and only these) open-access journals...  if universities are paying a fee towards these journals, they may 'gently encourage' their researchers to target these journals, interfering with the established metric used in grant applications (impact factors).  I currently do my best to publish my articles in journals where I consider the relevant 'conversation' to be occurring: usually where a substantial body of work already exists on my topic. While I would like think this is universally true, I am well aware many authors publish in the highest-ranking journals they can, regardless of the conversations already in place.  A paper in Physical Review Letters is highly prized and well regarded, but the journal did not make the cut for open access because it charged too high a price per article.  I should also point out that public libraries in the US already benefit from free access to many journals. In the case of the American Physical Society (APS), which publishes some of the most widely read articles in particle physics – Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, and Reviews of Modern Physics – public library journal access has been free since 2010, with the hope of extending this model to other countries in the future.  The APS already allows researchers to publish their papers as barrier-free open-access under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), but for a substantial article-processing charge. It is this charge that the SCOAP³ will essentially be paying on the behalf of particle physicists, but is this even necessary? ... While SCOAP³ is pushing for “free” open-access to particle physics journals, we physicists already have something along these lines available. The online pre-print server arXiv... The arXiv provides a mailing service that sends out daily updates of new additions in a chosen field. Some of my work is in nuclear theory physics, so I subscribe to a mailing list that alerts me to the title, authors, and abstract of every new addition to the 'nucl-th' section of archived pre-prints. Each day I can catch up on what is in the process of publication in that field. Importantly, I can do this away from the university – at home, or abroad – and so can the public... For the general public interested in research, I find it interesting there would be a push towards a further opening up of physics research, and not more obvious fields such as medical research.  I would love to have media sources cite the research articles they cover, and have those articles available to scrutinise. This would of course reduce the impact of headlines reading 'Y cures Z' if, with just a click, you could see that, 'Y mildly correlates with Z (r=0.35), in mice (n=6), under lab-conditions'”...