The Case for Open Access Publishing - Mehlum - 2012 - International Studies Perspectives - Wiley Online Library

Use the link to access the full text article form the journal "International Studies Perspectives" published by the International Studies Association and available through Wiley.  The abstract reads as follows: "This article presents some of the main efficiency and fairness arguments in favor of open access publishing. It discusses how general open access could affect research and editorial practice. It ends with a discussion of the feasibility of open access and how a move to open access publishing could happen.  This article contains a discussion of some of the core issues related to the economics of open access journal publishing. By “open access,” I refer to full open access, which simply means that all published academic articles of a particular journal are available for download by anyone over the Internet free of charge. In this limited space, I primarily cover issues where I think I have something to say. The article contains a mix of my personal views as an academic, as an economist, and as an editor of a minor open access journal.  The issues I raise relate both to economic efficiency and to fairness. I will point to the general benefits of open access and in particular to the distribution to poor countries. I base the discussion on my own experience in publishing an open access journal. I end the discussion by some thoughts on the realism and feasibility of a general transition to open access. My experience is primarily from economics, but clearly, it has some relevance for other social science disciplines as well as for the humanities. I think, however, that the issue of open access in disciplines such as medicine, where commercial interests are much more important, has to be approached differently. For readers who want to go deeper into the various aspects of the economics of open access publishing, I recommend the two symposia inEconomic Analysis and Policy (2009) and in Nature (2004) and a report on the costs and benefits of open access publishing (Houghton et al. 2009). All these are appropriately available online, free of charge."