Bill Hooker:
But the next time you hear someone talk about the "cost" of publishing in OA journals, please point 'em here.
And the 'here' of that sentence is this post which should disabuse you, once for all, of the idea that publishing in OA is more expensive than publishing with the dinosaur publishers. Bookmark that post and have the link ready for whenever you hear that myth pop its head up.
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Thanks for the link, Bora. I'm hoping these facts will start to catch on, so we can get past Elsevier-style FUD.
Since a greater proportion of non-OA journals charge author-side fees than OA journals, I'd now like to know just what those fees usually amount to. I know I've paid hundreds of dollars in page and print charges; I wonder what the average is? Know any sociology-of-science students looking for a little (OK, actually pretty enormous) project?
I don't know. If OA is going to work, it will require an increase in author fees. In the end someone's got to pay for the editors and staff, especially in high impact journals that have lots of production cost and have low acceptance rates. PLoS Biology is charging almost 3K per journal, and they are loosing money despite the fact that there they do not produce a hard copy of the journal. Sure, the production cost could drop dramatically but in the end we scientists will end up paying - and I'm all for that, but lets not kid ourselves.
If OA is going to work, it will require an increase in author fees.
Dude, did you even skim my entry?
OA works fine for Medknow, Hindari and BMC, all of whom charge a good deal less than PLoS (Medknow charge no author-side fees at all). The majority of OA journals do not charge author-side fees, whereas 75% of non-OA journals in a recent survey DO charge author-side fees IN ADDITION to subscription charges. You're actually more likely to end up giving the publisher money if you choose a non-OA title than if you choose an OA journal.
PLoS has yet to turn a profit because they're doing two things at once: being a very visible example of OA quality, and breaking new ground. There were OA journals before PLoS, but who had ever heard of them? There's a very real cost associated with going first.
And don't get me started on the whole "impact" thing. Impact factors are a clumsy metric even when used as designed, and they weren't designed as a proxy for research quality. One of the things that will make OA work is the much richer and more flexible citation based metrics that OA will enable. Google Scholar and OAIster and PubMed Central don't give a rat's arse about "journal prestige", and once scientists grok that fact, neither will they.