Counting the Holes in the Swiss Cheese: “Read and Publish” Discovers America - The Scholarly Kitchen

"With the recent announcement by the MIT libraries and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the “read and publish” (RAP) model has come to the U.S. We have seen this model or close variants (“publish and read”) before, in Europe, where national consortia have been working toward “flipping” traditional models to fully open access (OA) models. In such models, institutions and consortia pay a fee to make all their authors’ work immediately OA. We should expect to see more deals like this. (See Roger Schonfeld’s post on some of the limitations on a full and speedy rollout.) Indeed, this would appear to be the implication of the quotation ascribed to Emma Wilson of RSC in the press release: We are a not-for-profit publisher of high-quality chemical science content, our aim is to sustainably disseminate this research and information. As part of our commitment to sustainable open access publishing, we work with individual institutions to agree [sic] content deals specific to their needs. My personal alarm system, which is designed to provide an early warning when idealists and utopians are in the neighborhood, was triggered by the word “sustainable,” and so I placed a call to my old friend, the God of Unintended Consequences, to see what he has in store for us...."