More Thoughts About Scholarly Publishing | FromMelbin

"Pay-to-publish Gold OA is defective and not sustainable; the research cycle does need more transparency; and there is a need for more public involvement in discussions about Open Access.

Publicly funded research in many universities, like those here in Australia, is not shared openly and the tax-paying public pay for it many times over:

1. Government funded universities. 2. Subscriptions or purchases of all the research that is given away for free, mostly to several large publishing houses who own most academic research in the many ways discussed below. 3. We pay for any research that has to be made Open Access in the form of outrageous 'Article Processing Charges' (APCs). 4. We pay the same publishers for access to systems that give us metrics and indexes on who is being read or cited the most, etc. (Scopus, Web of Science, etc.). 5. We pay many of the same publishers to join their ratings and rankings games so we can boast about how well we are doing in a relative sense."