Information Rseearch: Editorial Vol 18 No 3

"A big piece of news in the open access world recently has been the report of the Business, Innovation and Skills committee of the UK Parliament on the government's decision to back the recommendations of the Finch Committee. This saw the government prepared to spend its own money and that of the universities on making more payments to publishers on behalf of authors, for publication in 'hybrid' open access journals. 'Hybrid' because these, in fact, are subscription journals with occasional open access papers: in effect this gives the publishers a second income stream for the same output and, to its credit, the BIS committee recognized this when, it seems, the Finch Committee was blind to it. On the other hand, that blindness might have had something to do with the fact that the Finch Committee was stacked with present and former publishers. Their recommendations were fine for the government which is happy to support business at the expense of the public good - a concept that disappeared from the Tory vocabulary fifty years ago. Damning the so-called 'Gold' route, the BIS commttee has called for the UK government to support its previous investment in institutional repositories, calling for any embargo period for open access to be limited to six months, and for author charges to be paid only to genuinely open access journals, the PLoS journals are mentioned as an example. I prefer to term the 'Gold' route the 'Brass' route, since the connotation of precious metal is clearly wrong, and 'brass' is a common north of England dialect term for money. The fact that brass is an alloy also serves to remind us that the hybrid Gold journal uses a mixture of subscription and author charging. Typically, however, since no committee on open access I've ever come across has dealt with the issue, journals like Information Research, which do not levy subscriptions or charge authors for publication - and which I've previously called the 'Platinum' route - are not considered at all. Academics and the institutions in which they work have been criminally slow to understand the advantages that open access journal publishing has given them. Either individually or in consortia, institutions have been able for years to create new, free, open access journals. Yes, it takes a while for such a journal to become established, but does anyone really believe that a journal published by, say, University College London and Imperial College, London, or any other consortium, would not have become very quickly a key journal in its field, particulary if authors were required to choose such a journal for their submissions? The same goes for key individuals: scientists of repute could easily get together and publish an OA journal. The lack of imagination and initiative in the academic world is clearly, at least in part, a consequence of research assessment, with, in some cases at least, the 'quality' of a paper being measured by nothing less suspect than citation measures. But it is also a lack of courage. Information Research has never charged a subscription, or levied author charges; both of these methods of raising money reduce the potential value of the papers to others working in the same research areas. What does it matter how good a paper is, if you can't afford a subscription, or if the author cannot afford the charges. However, given the extent to which author charges for open access are now paid by either funding agencies or institutions, it seems reasonable to ask those authors who can recover the cost, to make a donation to the journal, once the paper has been accepted. That donation will not be of the order of the $3,000 and more that the commercial publishers seek, but only £250 ($400 or &Euro;300). Authors who make such a donation will have their paper converted to html, rather than having to do it themselves. I am taking this step because at some point in the not-too-distant future, I shall be handing on the journal to another publisher (I hope it will be an academic institution) and, at that point, it will be desirable for that institution to find resources to publish the journal including, probably, paying a part-time Editor. If this practice is established by then, the hand-over will probably go more smoothly than otherwise ..."