"Some ideas are so obviously right and fair that it seems incredible that they haven’t always existed, or at least that they weren’t immediately adopted the moment they were thought up. I’d put women’s suffrage in that category along with the abolition of slavery, universal healthcare and a free independent press. Open Access to scientific research is another such idea. It is a complete no brainer that in order to support a rapid and efficient advance in our rational understanding of the world, everyone should have free and unfettered access to the results of scientific research. So why, some ten or more years after the concept of Open Access was coherently expressed, has it not taken over the world, or at least the world of scientific publishing? ...
the problem is that Open Access has got tangled up in a debate about the cost and value of things. Although Open Access started out as a philosophically pure movement it got seized on by many as a way to make publishing cheaper. That’s understandable given the way that library budgets were and are being squeezed... Rather it seems that in order to deliver less expensive publishing, the most prominent Open Access publications are discovering what they can do without. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact it is providing the opportunity to assess both the cost and the value of many of the things we took for granted 10-15 years ago... As a consequence of being Open Access you pretty much have to give up on printing issues. If you are distributing a journal for free to anyone who wants it you can’t carry the costs of ink, paper and postage... A journal like the shiny new eLife has chosen to dispense with the services of full time professional editors. This may not be a cost cutting exercise-eLife is keen to imply that part time academic editors are better at understanding and judging research than people who do nothing else-but there is no denying that highly qualified full time staff can be expensive.With so called ‘megajournals’ (those journals which are designed to publish huge numbers of articles: hundreds or more each week) the role of selectivity is removed. Scientific Reports, PLOS ONE and the like publish any papers that are scientifically sound. Again there are solid arguments for why this is a philosophically good idea, but when you get paid for each paper published, having a low rejection rate is going to also be good business. Then there are journals which don’t provide sub-editing for their articles, or in some other way have stripped down the production process. For the ultimate in stripped down publication you can turn to ArXiv. ArXiv has no formal peer review, practically no editorial selection, no subediting, nothing much more than the facilitating of direct communication between authors and readers. Stripped down that far, ArXiv can manage to fund itself without charging readers or authors. It may be that the reason Open Access is not taking off as fast as many of its advocates have predicted is because authors must consider all these other variables when deciding whether to publish Open Access or not... There may be an upside to this burst of experimentation in scientific publishing models sparked by the Open Access movement. Sure, there is going to be uncertainty for a while but maybe, just maybe, we will find out what scientists really value and (more importantly) what they are prepared to pay for it. In which case lets be a bit more blatant about the experiment. Let’s take a leaf out of the ‘low-cost’ airlines, book and establish…EasyJournal..."