In Support of Closed-access Publishing? « Homolog.us – Bioinformatics

"All of our commentaries related to publishing had been along the same line, and we were very receptive about a number of newly founded open-access journals. However, today we were looking for information on open access and came across the following comment from Rebecca Rooney - 'I used to be an advocate of 'Open Access' publishing. But in my new position as faculty, I’m changing my mind. Open Access publishing can be very expensive. I recently opted to make a paper 'Open Access' at a cost of $3000. In retrospect, I don’t know that it was a wise use of funds. For the same cost I could have hired a co-op student for a term or sent a graduate student to an international conference. Given how hard we work to raise research dollars as new faculty, I am starting to resent all the pressure to spend thousands extra on each publication. Especially when you consider that most copyright agreements allow researchers to archive a pre-print or even post-print version on their websites' ...  After reading it, we remembered that one of our readers (S. Malhotra) previously made a comment along similar line in 'New Bioinformatics Business Model – Make Software Free, Charge for Manual' ...  Our usual response is to show how much the educational organizations and funding agencies are losing with closed access and so on (the points typically made by Mike Eisen or PeerJ here), but those arguments are not very helpful for an ordinary researcher trying to properly allocate her small research budget.  What will you tell Rebecca Rooney or S. Malhotra ..."