Ricardo Guerrero and Mercè Piqueras, Open access. A turning point in scientific publication, International Microbiology, September 2004. A detailed survey and defense of OA journals. Excerpt: "The future of the Open Access Initiative has been the subject of heated discussion among scientists, publishers, learned societies, librarians and even government funding agencies and individuals in charge of setting scientific policy. The main questions being debated are: (a) should all scientific literature be open access?, (b) if so, how should the costs of publishing be met?, and (c) who should cover these costs?...International Microbiology is now immediately available (i.e. as soon as the articles are placed on the Internet) at its own website and at a public repository, SciELO Spain....Like other journals published by most scientific societies, International Microbiology is not expected to make a profit. Nevertheless, publishing --either in print or electronically-- implies significant costs, which are continuously increasing and have to be covered....The main problem of open access [publishing] that must be solved is making journals accessible not only to readers but also to authors who cannot afford to pay the page charges in order to have their articles published. Otherwise, those authors will be forced, as a researcher from Slovakia stated in a letter to Nature on March 5, 2004, 'to read the articles from PLoS Biology --for free-- and try to publish [their] work in Science or Nature --also for free.' " International Microbiology is published by the Spanish Society of Microbiology.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/20/2004 11:12:00 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.
