Open access publishing is now common in the sciences, in fact are a
condition of funding for NIHR, MRC, ESRC etc and you can request funds
to cover charges as part of any grant budget. Personally I support such
things, but the charges are onerous for projects without research grants.
£250 is fairly cheap - PLoS and BioMed Central for example charge c
US$1000 per article depending on the journal. PLoS journals are very
high impact now if that is your bag.
You can of course deposit a word pre-publication version on your
manuscript in UKPMC that will be open access for nothing if your article
is life science related. For ESRC research you can deposit it in the
ESRC Society Today archive. You can also deposit a pre-pub version on
your home webpage or institutional repository.
Of course I would ensure that the publisher is a not for profit, and not
a paper mill. Some 'open access' publishers may have looser quality
criteria in order to maximise income from page charges and there are
possible scholarly implications as suggested by this story in Nature.
"Editor will quit over hoax paper
Computer-generated manuscript accepted for publication in open-access
journal.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090615/full/news.2009.571.html"
Best
Steve
Halfacree K.H. wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
>
>
> A quick question. What do folks think of the following arrangement?
>
>
>
> “Open access publishing proposes a relatively new model for scholarly
> journal publishing that provides immediate, worldwide, barrier-free
> access to the full-text of all published articles. Open access allows
> all interested readers to view, download, print, and redistribute any
> article without a subscription, enabling far greater distribution of an
> author's work than the traditional subscription-based publishing model….
> In an open access model, the publication costs of an article are paid
> from an author's research budget, or by their supporting institution, in
> the form of Article Processing Charges (APC). APCs replace subscription
> charges and allow publishers to make the full-text of every published
> article freely available to all interested readers. In addition, authors
> who publish in our open access journals retain the copyright of their work…”
>
> Personally, I’m unsure. APC of c.250 pounds and having a very very
> limited ‘research budget’, versus the great benefits of open access…
>
>
>
> Cheers, and now back to marking…. Keith
>
--
Steven Cummins MSc PhD
Senior Lecturer & NIHR Fellow
Department of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
T: 44 020 7882 7653 (direct)
F: 44 020 7882 7479
E: [log in to unmask]
W: Healthy Environments Research Programme
http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/healthyenvironments/index.html
http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/staff/cumminss.html
