Open access -- its time has come?

“The rumbling about open access to scientific publications is getting louder... A boycott of academic publisher Elsevier began 6 months ago when British mathematician Tim Gower issued a 'call to action' to urge academics to refuse to submit to or review for any Elsevier journal... To date, 12,000 scientists have joined the boycott. You too can add your name to the list... The fundamental issue has to do with open access to the results of scientific research, particularly research funded by public money.  Gower's specific objections are that major academic publishers charge usurious prices for subscriptions to single journals, often $1000 or more ... Three major publishing houses, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, produce the bulk of the more than 20,000 academic journals published worldwide, and over 40% of the journal articles that appear each year.  This is big business, with a profit margin of 35% or more, according to numerous sources (here or here, e.g.), worth on the order of $12 billion a year... Peer review is the process that is meant to ensure high quality contributions to journals, though it's the highest tier -- and most lucrative -- journals that can get the most well-known academics to do the reviews, and they might be asked to review hundreds of papers a year... Journal subscriptions already can be prohibitively expensive, and even access to a single paper can cost $30 or more. Yes, publishing costs money, and if authors and reviewers were paid it would cost even more, but when the work has been funded by public money, and the writing and reviewing is free to the publisher, and then the results sequestered behind a paywall, given the increasingly organized protests, the system is looking more and more unsustainable...  PLoS (Public Library of Science) has been publishing open access journals since 2008, and they quickly became well-respected -- high impact -- places to publish... ArXiv is an early adopter of e-print service, online since 1991... More recently, a petition from the White House to require open Internet access to taxpayer-funded research reached the magic number of 25,000 signatures and so the idea that publications of publicly funded research results must be freely available online is now officially in play in the upper echelons of government...  The National Institutes of Health enacted public access policies requiring that scientists who are publishing results of NIH funded research to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts to a publically accessible digital archive (PubMed Central) upon acceptance for publication... The library, and Faculty Advisory Council, of at least one major university, Harvard, are urging their faculty to submit their work to open access journals, primarily because journals have become prohibitively expensive and this is a way to chip away at the status quo. Further alternatives to the traditional publishing model are beginning to appear, as Reuters reported on June 12.  One  is called PeerJ, the founders of which come from PLoS and the research database, Mendeley... They offer a 3-tier subscription scheme; until September for $99 you purchase a lifetime right to publish a single paper a year in their journals ... Another open access journal about to come online, eLife, is a joint collaboration of the Howard Hughes Institutes, Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Institute... Indeed, everybody has to earn a living, and that includes people who work for Elsevier.  And our pension plans are based on stock which means on profits.  It is not surprising that the status journals work hard to preserve their market-share.  Nor can we be blamed for succumbing to this aspect of the status system, given how rewards are doled out in academia... Directly or otherwise, publishers play on your fears: that if you don't publish in their expensive high-visiblity journals, you won't get tenure or a grant.  Making us vulnerable, they make it difficult to resist the game they're playing... The peer review argument also rings rather hollow.  First, peer review can also mean insider-club exclusion, and we know that innovative ideas have a tough row to hoe.  Second, anyone in academe knows that you can always find someplace to publish your work if you try hard enough (PLoS One is one place).  Peer review may once have served as a guard at the quality gate, but those days were long gone decades ago in terms of serious quality control.  We think there is no serious evidence that e-journals have lower standards -- and indeed, PLoS One, often the whipping boy for this argument, has published some very fine papers, indeed... So, given everything, change is hard, always has uncertainties, and we're all in a tangle that keeps costs higher than they need to be. And those not in science are paying the price for it... But, it does look as though the push for open access is getting stronger, big money is starting to rally behind it, and a consensus is perhaps beginning to build.”