Alastair Dryburgh, Open access --time to stop preaching to the converted? A preprint of an article to appear in Learned Publishing, January 2004. On price differentiation in the processing fee as a strategy to make OA publishing more appealing to conventional journals. Excerpt: "Here you do not aspire to be the cheapest, but to be superior in some way, thereby commanding a premium price which supports your higher costs. This is clearly the approach of the Public Library of Science journals, which charge $1,500 per article, three times the previous benchmark. It is also the approach which will commend itself to existing publishers, for whom the assembly line model is quite alien. Adopting it would require not merely a complete reengineering of their processes but a complete change of culture as they eliminate activities representing much of their traditional value added.
There are a couple of fairly obvious dimensions for differentiation which, oddly, seem to be neglected to date. As far as I can ascertain, nobody is charging different fees for articles of differing complexity or length. Nor have I managed to find a graduated policy for fee waiver --it seems to be all or nothing. Here a sliding scale policy would be both equitable and economically efficient."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/03/2003 09:43:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
