JVS/AVS Chief Editors’ opinion on Open Access - vegsciblog.org

"This Commentary is a part of the series asking the question: should Applied Vegetation Science, the journal owned by IAVS [International Association of Vegetation Science] and published by Wiley, become Gold Open Access? For the context and link to other Commentaries, please visit Editorial....

The mission of IAVS and its journals is to serve all the vegetation scientists globally. From this perspective, changing the journals to Open Access publication model presents a risk of exclusion of many colleagues who cannot afford to pay APCs. Therefore, we prefer to wait until the systems that would guarantee equal access to publication funds are implemented in most of the countries from which we regularly receive submissions. For the moment, we propose that both journals continue to be published under the current hybrid model, in which single articles can be published Open Access if the authors can and wish to pay...."