Open Access News

A slight sense of despondency overcame me when I saw in a number of recent posts on various discussion fora about open access, that the fallacy of the number of journals being a measure of size (of activity or the amount of article published in a certain area) is alive and well. The fallacious argument is used by members of the pro-open-access camp as well those from anti-open-access circles. The pros are saying “look how many open access journals there are!” and the antis “look how few open access journals!”, either of them proving or disproving exactly nothing....Even if journals were more uniform in size, counting open access journals to establish how much peer-reviewed material is available with open access is flawed. It is with very good reason that the Bethesda Statement says “Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.” Some BioMed Central journals have non-open-access articles and an increasing number of journals will publish open access material (e.g. Springer’s 1250 odd titles and a growing selection of OUP's and Blackwell’s titles, among others). Number of articles is a better measure than numbers of journals, but what seems more important to me is the number of opportunities that authors have to publish with open access. They have grown dramatically over the last year.

And in another post, The joys of choice, half an hour later:

In the previous post I questioned the validity of ‘number of journals’ as proof for the amount of publishing activity in open access. A follow-up question I have is this: why is all this a priori ‘proof’ necessary in the first place? What ‘proof’ is needed to show that open access articles are accessible to more people? It is in the very concept! What ‘proof’ is needed to demonstrate that paying an amount upfront for the service of publishing is worse, or better, for its economic sustainability than paying for subscriptions? The proof of that particular pudding is simply in de eating. Any choices between open access and non-open access will be made by those who actually have the choice: authors and their (financial) backers. The latter (the backers) can even impose that choice. Publishers can't – and shouldn't. The only thing to do for publishers – be they societies or independent outfits – is to offer the choice.