I just stumbled upon this over at Taylor and Francis (publisher for Australasian Journal of Philosophy).
Their plan is called iOpenAccess. They will make any articles that you publish with them freely available to the public, but…
All authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication in one of these iOpenAccess journals will have the option to make their articles available to all via the Journal’s website, and to post to repositories, for a one-off fee of $3250.
?!?!
Here’s another option. Publish your article with a genuinely free and open access journal. Don’t pay them anything. Have your work be freely available.
The Bad Open Access Idea (boai – not to be confused with the BOAI) is the Trojan Horse, described in this series of postings (sorry for the long URL!):
http://blogsearch.google.ca/blogsearch?hl=en&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active&ie=UTF-8&q=%22trojan+horse%22+blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&btnG=Search+Blogs
Probably doesn’t sound too strange if they also do science journals – they usually have to pay to publish anyway.
Hi Stevan,
Thanks for that link. Sorry for the delay in your comment being posted – the long URL (plus the word ‘trojan’ I presume) meant I had to approve the comment first. Those stories are good reads.
Thom,
Steve’s link is relevant to your commment. It looks like this strategy has been attempted in the scientific community. One of the stories discusses how the American Chemical Society is trying this, and it is sparking outrage even amongst the scientists.
Even the Public Library of Science requires authors to pay for their publications to be open access. The fees are very similar, and are in the range of $2000-$3000. http://www.plos.org/
I do give them credit for the fact that if you cannot afford the cost, they will waiver the fee for you, but for a website that is heavily promoting open access, it still seems like it falls short of true open access.
The other positive thing about the PLoS is that it is non-profit, and they explicitly state, “PLoS journals use a business model in which our expenses — including those of peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving — are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish.”
With the exception of hosting and archiving, I really have no idea how much those other things cost. However, I do not see why a government grant could not be used to offset these costs (this is under the assumption that they do not have an insanely high cost to begin with, I could be completely wrong). For all the money that is spent on education, it does not seem unreasonable to provide funding so that everyone can have free access to research and papers.
Obviously, one could argue that grant money given to individuals (or groups) for a research project could be set aside to pay for this author fee, but not everyone can get a grant for their research project.
Although I suggest a government grant, I think it should be more of a global issue. After all, open access means open access for everyone in the world. I am really not sure how the global community should handle this, but I feel like a global effort to providing open access is the way to go.
Hi Jon,
Thank for the comment. This info on PLoS is interesting and helpful.
I think I would have less of a problem if the publishing body were non-profit or pumping money back into the relevant academic community in some way.
Yeah, Springer has this “Open Choice” thing that is quite similar:
http://www.springer.com/open+choice?SGWID=0-40359-12-115394-0
3 grand to make it open access! I’d like to know if anyone has actually paid and done this. I just can’t wait until Philosphers’ Imprint and other open access journals are so awesome and everyone wants to publish in and be like them.
Josh,
I think Philosophers’ Imprint is already there, isn’t it?