Peter Suber - Google+ - Once more: correcting the canard that OA always or usually…

"Quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education: 'Blaise Simqu, president and chief executive officer of SAGE Publications...said, 'open access is a burden on the individual researcher,' who often has to find money to cover some publication costs, like article-processing fees.' http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/amidst-a-revolution-publishers-must-know-their-end-users-speaker-says/42249 Comment: Simqu assumes (1) that all or most OA is gold OA, and (2) that all or most gold OA charges author-side fees. Both assumptions are false. The first has been false and known to be false since the birth of OA, and the second has been known to be false since the ALPSP-sponsored Kaufman-Wills study in 2005. Is Simqu really unaware of these facts? Or is he deliberately spreading FUD? Unfortunately we have to keep repeating these facts in the face of repeated, high-profile misrepresentations. Let's fix the underlying problem, namely, the repeated, high-profile misrepresentations. Let's stop the FUD. Here's a concise summary of the facts to post or paraphrase as needed. Researchers can make their peer-reviewed research OA through repositories (green OA) or journals (gold OA) . When they choose repositories, there is no burden and no fee. When they choose journals, sometimes there are fees and sometimes there are not. Most peer-reviewed OA journals (70%) charge no fees at all . When OA journals do charge fees, the fees are usually paid by the author's funder (59%) or employer (24%), and rarely by the author out of pocket (12%). See the SOAP study , Table 4. For more detail, see my recent post , How often do authors at fee-based OA journals pay the fees out of pocket?"