The Economics of OA Publishing: Is Open Access Free? - Enago Blog: Scientific Publication Help

"According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), there are at present over 10,000 fully Open Access (OA) peer-reviewed scholarly journals from 135 countries, offering 1.7 million searchable articles. The above numbers reflect that in less than a decade, almost one-third of the world’s scholarly journals are now open to everyone with an Internet connection. In this context, OA is a great success. The mechanism of Open Access was originally envisioned for getting academic work into the hands of scientists and students who could best benefit from it and put it to the best use. It was actually directed at the sclerotic pace of the traditional publishing model for academic journals. Researchers often complained that journals held near-monopolistic control over their specific niches, with ranking factors based on citation volume. What Open Access has tried to do is to minimize the impact of this ‘citation’ factor that so far acted as a high barrier to entry for any new journal concepts. Is It Still About Money? Enabled by the adoption of the Creative Commons License model in 2005, OA has succeeded in bringing vast troves of academic research to a global audience. So much so, that the users and consumers of such material start viewing that access as being ‘free.’ But is Open Access free? The reality of how the OA financial model works is actually quite different ..."