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1) Open access journals are on the rise, and beginning to get some recognition - but I think it will take another 5 yrs, to be honest, given slowness to repond to change in academia generally. 2) Ours, the J of Political Ecology, http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/ is published in 3 languages (in theory but not much in practice) with 3 language abstracts. I don't have the download figures which must be in the thousands, but our rates of citation, especially for articles written by some of the bigger names like A. Escobar, are into 3 figures and at times have exceeded similar journals like Human Organization, Human Ecology, Ecology & Society, and Capitalism/Nature/Socialism. Our operating budget is $0 and I produce the articles in my (lack of) spare time. Not enough geographers publish with us, by the way. 3) Rankings. The Australian government is obsessed with journal rankings and metrics at present (which is very different to loooking at the quality of individual articles, as the RAE focused on, at least when I was last around, for the 2001 UK assessment) and their latest list called ERA does at least acknowledge some open access journals. Ours gets a 'B' ranking for quality (out of A*, A, B, C, and not worth ranking) which at least means it is off the starting block. The data is here but social science lists are not yet all released http://www.arc.gov.au/era/journal_list.htm . Ironically, you can still get more credit for publishing in a closed access Australian geography or anthropology journal than an open access one with a true global reach. Don't worry, the hard journals to publish in, like the Annals are still ranked A*. 4) On a more successful note, the Journal of Maps, which I am also associated with, has been able to get Thomson ISI listing this year.http://www.journalofmaps.com/ . Ironically it only has a 'C' quality ranking in Australia. Articles are built around cartography or other media, which I guess makes it a bit different. 5) A further issue is author costs. 'Open' journals are increasingly charging authors, since they have no subscribers. J of Maps charges 50 quid per article, and Environmental Research letters charges US$1900 unless you can claim an exception. One in my field, Ecology & Society http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/ , charges "US$750 for the first 5000 words and US$100 for every 1000 words thereafter", which means I won't be submitting anything there at the moment! I guess the money to run things has to come from somewhere, but it is worth noting that publishing (as opposed to reading) is not really 'Open' if author charges 'close' the option of publishing for you. Kudos to ACME, (which is free by the looks of it?), and our JPE gave up charging US$10 a while back cos nobody paid! Not sure about Surv.&Soc. 6) Muddying the waters of the open/closed debate, however, is that journal publisher restrictions on putting a copy of an article on a web page have not really worked - everybody does it in one form or another, with permission or not, sometimes it can be done legally by lodging a redrafted copy in an e-library archive, as the LSE does. So, essentially, many closed access journal articles appear online as PDF after a few months and are easy to read and cite without needing a subscription. Some of my PhD applicants from devloping countries rely on these articles when writing their proposals - they have no access to library systems. 7) Do we need shelves of back copies in our offices? I don't, so I am not inclined to receive printed copies of them anymore. The environmental costs are less for online. My students (all younger) don't seem to need printouts as much, either. 8) US university publishers appear to be moving to online monograph publishing pretty fast, and want to offer individuals a dowload, or libraries subscriptions to their online books. Printing on demand is still possible, as Monash and ANU Presses already offer down here. Printing off a few hundred books is no longer economic. Change ahead. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/23/michigan S Dr. Simon Batterbury, Director, Office of Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, 3010 VIC Australia. +61 (03) 8344 5073 Fax: +61 (03) 8344 5650 http://www.environment.unimelb.edu.au & Associate Professor, Dept. of Resource Management and Geography, simonpjb@ unimelb.edu.au http://www.simonbatterbury.net