Open does not mean free | NWO

"The bottom line is that, for scientific knowledge to be published, someone has to pay. But who? And could those costs be reduced? ‘The risk is that you replace the barrier to reading with a barrier to publishing.’ ...

One option is to find other sources of funding. Several universities and research funders have funds to allow open access journals. A few years ago, Jean-Sébastien Caux, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam, founded SciPost, a platform where anyone can read and post scientific publications free of charge. Some universities and funders pay for costs such as layout, a website, the peer-review system and archiving. In addition, KNAW, NWO and the OPUS Foundation support the platform openjournals.nl, which enables smaller independent Dutch and Belgian journals in the social sciences and humanities to publish open access. Societies or journal owners can use the platform at cost price, and authors can publish without publication costs. Existing publishers could also start to work differently, for instance using the subscribe-to-open model. In this case, libraries still pay subscription fees but on the condition that publishers use those funds to make their journals open access, with no APCs. ‘We’ve focused on the big deals for a long time’, says Bianca Kramer. ‘Now it’s time to explore alternative funding models.’ This does not yet mean that costs will come down; for that, the dependence on certain journals would have to lessen. Kramer: ‘Researchers are in a dilemma: they do want to get away from that journal prestige, but they still feel compelled by the existing system of research evaluation to publish in precisely these journals.’ "