Gavin Melles wrote:
> Actually, I had a personal experience of submitting something to BioMedCentral in Medical Education, with a paper I had to eventually withdraw (and send elsewhere) because they wanted to charge me ~$1000 for the privilege of reviewing it
There is a fundamental problem with open-access publishing. Although it
is ethically very powerful - removing from publishers the opportunity to
control access to publicly funded research - it still costs money.
Biomed Central is one model that works because it serves a community of
researchers engaged in scientific work where dissemination costs are not
a large part of the total project budget. Science funding organisations
like this approach and many of them will allow these costs as part of a
project budget. Biomed Central has a progressive policy that reduces or
removes the cost for researchers from poor countries. However Gavin's
experience at least illustrates that journal publishing is not a cheap
alternative to conferences - somebody has to pay a lot for every paper
and you don't even get lunch and a chance to meet your pals.
The BiomedCentral approach is unlikely to work in Design since there is
much less research funding available and arguably a lot of our research
does not need big bucks (although I'd like to see if we could get 100
Billion Euros to build a Design Accelerator somewhere in Switzerland).
The alternative model is for organisations and individuals to subsidise
publishing. Ken has mentioned one example, DRQ is funded in a small way
by DRS who provide the web space and web infrastructure, it's quite
expensive to keep that going and we always struggle to build and
maintain our website. DRQ is funded in a much bigger way by Peter
Storkerson and the editorial group who put a great deal of time and
effort into producing it. That costs them and their institutions real
money since they could use the time to good effect in other ways.
The International Journal of Design is another example, where the
editor, Lin-Lin Chen and her University are investing a lot of
resources, supported by the Taiwan National Science Council so we have a
journal that is free to read and free for authors. Don't take this kind
of good for granted, we owe all such ventures a huge debt. Gavin and the
rest of us can publish in this journal and our work is freely available
to everybody on the web and there is not cost to us at all. So our
research is subsidised by Taiwanese academics, a Taiwanese University
and the Taiwanese Government - is your university or your government
doing anything as good?
best wishes
Chris
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