Guest Post: Ben Allanach, On Open Access

"Recently, I've had to arrange payment of thousands of pounds to research journals to ensure that anyone around the world can read my research paper, despite the facts that it is freely available online, that it is my own work, that other academics have reviewed (judged) my work for free, and that my computer and I have made the graphics and done the type-setting. You may have heard of the recent drive to make researchers subscribe to the Open Access publishing model. Open Access cites some laudable aims: that research publications from publicly funded research should be freely available to anyone in the world. The trouble now is that researchers are being asked to pay charges made by the research publishing companies in order to make each paper `open access'. This money is paid from some funds sourced from the government which is ear marked for the process, and it's not cheap. I write four or more papers per year, and for the last couple of papers I've recently written, the charge was about 2000 pounds for each. Why I can't dodge this charge because my papers are all already freely available on the internet mystifies me, although the rules are in a state of flux and I hope that this will change ... Physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, quantitative biologists and quantitative financiers have been working with the web-site xxx.arXiv.org for 20 years now, and it works fantastically well. We post every paper on it and it is available from the following day for anyone to freely view and print. After a week, we wait for comments from the research community (usually via emails) and make changes accordingly. Then, we submit it to a research journal. If the journal's reviewer requires changes, we make these, and re-post the new version to the arXiv. The first thing I do when I start work every day is to read all of the titles and abstracts from the previous day's arXiv on particle physics. If any of them look interesting, I click and it's there on my screen, to be read and printed if I need to. When you post a paper on the arXiv, it receives a date and time stamp that banishes any arguments about which researchers did what when (successive versions also get date and time stamps, and as a reader you can choose which version to read). People use the arXiv for many different forms of research: from information on how many times others have referenced a paper to other systemic research about the field. One ingenious application used the arXiv to make a map of the subject by its papers and their references, for instance.There is no need for us to be paying these Open Access charges to the publishers, effectively giving them tax-payers' money that I would like to see directed to the research itself. The versions of our papers on the arXiv aren't type-set exactly as in the the journal, and they haven't been through the journal's proof-reading process, but all of the essential information is there. For free.  So, why doesn't everyone use the arXiv? For example, medical, biological and chemical scientific research is not published there, nor is that from the humanities and other arts. Yes, there are some commercial interests: people who are funded by companies that don't want their competitors to see the results. But surely such funders are against publication in any form? ..."