Open access to Public Understanding of Science
peter.suber's bookmarks 2013-07-14
Summary:
"PUS [Public Understanding of Science] believes that paid for [fee-based gold] open access will discriminate against authors from the developing world....PUS is not against open access, the promotion of which, we consider in principle a good idea. It is clearly not conducive to the distribution of scientific knowledge that publishers like Elsevier can reap 37% annual profit from publishing academic papers on research that has been funded by other sources (see Economist, April 14th 2012). We know that social science publishers like SAGE, the publishers of PUS, are not in this league...Our current position with our publishers is that we are not part of “SAGE Choice”, their partial open access scheme, where the author decides whether to pay $3000 to purchase open access, recently dropped to $1500. We do not want a two-tier system of authors: open access for the grant-rich and subscription access for everybody else....We consider temporary free access to promote certain papers on merit. We are currently investigating whether this position stills holds with SAGE, who have ceded to requests from a small number of authors applying for open access....Since we first published this piece on the PUS blog (in April 2012), SAGE have reduced the level of pricing for opt-in Open Access, to make this more affordable...." [The editorial does not mention green OA or no-fee gold OA.]