Dear Colleagues,

This may not be the place to start (another) debate on Open Access (OA), but I’m not sure I understand this criticism. First, not all OA requires extra funding. Second, where it does (the ‘gold’ model), it is usually tied to research grants. These may be ‘unequally distributed’ (one hopes on grounds of intellectual ability), but it seems reasonable that if a funding agency thinks research is worth supporting, then they should also support the cost of disseminating the products of that research. In practice, OA costs rarely count for more than one or two percent of research spend. If this means that grant-funded researchers enjoy some sort of advantage over those without funding (over and above having their research paid for) then it would be better to think about ways of levelling up, rather than levelling down and insisting that all research outputs should be restricted behind subscription paywalls (and in recent debate I have heard a lot about inequality of access to funding for OA, and rather less about inequality of access to expensive subscription-only journals).

As for the implication that OA is at odds with peer-review, again I would disagree strongly. As far as I know, most publishers go to great lengths to separate the editorial assessment and peer-review from the OA payment process.

Best wishes

Simon

(and a declaration of interests: I am both an employee of the Wellcome Trust, which operates a strong OA mandate, and a Trustee of a learned society, which depends on journal income to fund many of its other charitable activities).

Dr Simon Chaplin
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Dear colleagues,

An obvious disadvantage of Open Access seems to me that authors would need access to funding for author fees. The chances for obtaining funding are unequally distributed on non-intellectual grounds such as age, nationality, gender (?). In case of a huge demand for funding, agencies such as universities and charities may have to develop policies on submission fees.

It seems to me that from a scholarly perspective, one should be in favour of peer-reviewing by Editors who are free to take decisions on intellectual grounds. In the Netherlands, for example, funding agencies favour OA; it provides them with an inroad on the publication system.

Best,

Loet Leydesdorff

University of Amsterdam

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/01/29/why-open-access-is-better-for-scholarly-societies/

“Why open access is better for scholarly societies

January 29th, 2013    Stuart M. Shieber http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/shieber/

[This is a heavily edited transcript of a talk that I gave on January 3, 2013, at a panel on open access at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA, the main scholarly society for linguistics, and publisher of the journal Language), co-sponsored by the Modern Language Association (MLA).]

Thank you for this opportunity to join the others on this panel in talking about open access. I will concentrate in particular on the relationship between open access and the future of scholarly societies. I’m thinking in particular of small to medium scholarly societies, which have small publishing programs that are often central to the solvency of the societies and to their ability to do the important work that they do. In one sense it should be obvious, and I think it’s been made obvious by the previous speakers, that open access meshes well with the missions of scholarly societies. LSA’s mission, for instance, is “to advance the scientific study of language. LSA plays a critical role in supporting and disseminating linguistic scholarship both to professional linguists and to the general public.” [Emphasis added.] So I’ll just assume the societal benefit of open access to researchers and to the general public alike. For the purpose of conversation let’s just take that as given. …”

Best wishes

Tristram

Dr Tristram Wyatt
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
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