Open Access Publishing: Pipe dream or the way forward for science?

" ... open access in practice is a very different beast than the OA evangelists might like – and can be difficult for the average researcher to navigate.  Canadian Science Publishing recently released a report on Canadian researchers’ publishing attitudes and behaviours. They found that, while researchers are aware of the OA movement, they don't know enough about OA (e.g., which funding agencies support OA publication fees, reputations of OA journals, available OA repositories) to make informed decisions. This is supported by Peter Suber’s article in The Guardian, which outlines six myths of open access to research that are still common across academia. Notably, researcher’s use of OA varies by scientific discipline, and most researchers are not putting into practice their OA principles.  The gold standard of OA is publishing in OA journals. Biologists are most likely to meet this standard (55% versus 33% in Physics/Astronomy and in Earth/Environmental Sciences), likely because of the good reputation of PLOSOne. But ultimately what it comes down to is cost and availability/reputation. According to the survey, most academic researchers are paying open access publishing fees out of their Tri-Agency grant (NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR), and the biggest reason for not choosing open access was economic ..."