Dear All
This is another model that I think has potential to bring down costs to the minimum and yet be open access.

But it is very new and yet to become popular with researchers.

http://www.webmedcentral.com/plus/wmc_editorial_board_info

It uses open reviews so there is no cost to the publisher except hosting the web page.
The paper is put out on the net, is open access, and it is peer reviewed from there.

After it has been approved by peer reviewers, it goes into the next web based indexed journal.

There is also a 'Author pays' route to publication where the journal gets the peer review, but one can go the other route and not pay anything.

Of course only time can tell, if researchers take to it and also whether when it becomes popular, the publishers will jack up charges. But for the present it looks like a model to kill the conventional 'author-pays-exorbitantly' model

Jacob Puliyel

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Suhail Doi <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Amy,

When we talk of OA, we mean "open" simply in terms of money ... nothing
else. Now how can it be OA if he restriction in terms of money is simply
shunted from users to authors? Its simply reverse restricted access
(RRA) not OA at all. So just as conventional journals restrict access to
non-prosperous readers, OA journals restrict access to non-prosperous
researchers. Both access models claim that they have pathways for "poor"
authors or "poor" readers but we know they do not work.

The much more dangerous aspect of OA is there is now a mechanism to
foster confirmatory bias since opinions backed by money (that differ
from the mainstream) will have a greater potential to see the light of
day as publishers are no longer making money from readers

Suhail

On 3/23/2012 11:45 AM, Amy Price wrote:
 Suhail,

 Are you saying that OA is not what it seems because the researchers will
 end up eating the costs so it is not OA at all because it reduces
 accessibility to all but quite prosperous researchers? Are you opposed for
 other reasons as well?

 Amy