OA interviews: Kamila Markram, Frontiers - Open-access publishing - Research Information

"Our approach has always been much more than just providing free access to research. The whole publishing process at Frontiers is community-driven, with active researchers taking all editorial decisions. We take great care in building our journal editorial boards: over 45,000 of the world’s leading researchers have joined us, many from top universities, making the Frontiers editorial board the largest in publishing. We developed a Collaborative Peer Review to improve the quality of articles. This provides a rigorous in-depth review that is also constructive, fair and transparent. Reviewers have a mandate to work with authors directly in our online Collaborative Review Forum, and their names are disclosed upon publication to acknowledge their contribution and to improve constructiveness. The entire process is highly efficient and fast, driven by our own software and workflows, enabling constructive interactions without administrative efforts from our academic editors and reviewers.  Frontiers journals publish articles through a gold OA publishing model that requires authors to pay an article-processing fee upon article acceptance. This enables articles to be published immediately without restriction. We also offer many article types that are free of charge. For example, Frontiers Focused Reviews, which are reviews of an original discovery, are published for free. In the past few years, a growing number of governments, institutions and funders have implemented progressive OA policies. One key challenge we need to overcome, however, is the lack of a unifying policy across these stakeholders. For example, some policies favour green OA with varying embargo periods, while others prefer gold. This patchwork of policies has caused confusion among researchers and institutions, and hinders progress towards universal gold OA. Also, most stakeholders do not, or cannot, enforce their OA policies, which has led to a slower uptake. But overall I think we have already reached a tipping point and all research will be made accessible via gold OA within the next decade. Another important challenge is the cultural change required in the mindset of the researchers themselves. Some academic communities are already well versed in the practice of gold or green OA. However, funding is, of course, also a challenge. Having to pay to publish articles is a novel concept for many academics. A common misconception, often wrongly propagated in blogs and sometimes picked up in established media, is that online OA publishing is low-cost. Yet it’s far from cheap to hire staff, produce high-quality article versions in PDF, XML and HTML, build and maintain software to process articles, store articles and associated files associated permanently on the internet, archive them in repositories, and many other operations. The key to addressing this challenge is advocacy: to explain OA publishing and its costs, and to show that publishing in subscription journals is not free either ..."