Katharine Sanderson, Open access, take it or leave it, Chemistry World (from the Royal Society of Chemistry), June 23, 2006. Excerpt:
The Royal Society, UK, is trialling a hybrid author-pays/reader-pays publishing model. The RS has been a stern critic of open access publishing in the past, and says there is an absence of evidence to support the author-pays model.
Using the hybrid model, authors are offered a choice: they can pay £300 per A4 page to make their paper freely available immediately; or they can pay nothing and wait 12 months for their paper to become freely available (the current model). Papers written by authors who choose the first option, called ‘EXiS Open Choice’, will be placed in the PubMedCentral repository.
The RS was prompted to test the hybrid model after frustrations that its call to the publishing sector to produce a study of different models was ignored, said a spokesperson for the society. In November 2005, the RS was critical of commercial open access publishers for profiting from publicly-funded research (see Chemistry World, January 2006, p6). ‘We haven’t changed, we’re in the same position,’ Bob Ward told Chemistry World. ‘We’ve always recognised the potential benefits of OA, but we’re also aware that there are some potential drawbacks.’...
Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers applauded the ‘very sensible’ move by the RS. The only way to test open access is to give researchers the choice, Morris told Chemistry World. ‘Open access isn’t the complete answer,’ she said. She predicts a collective ‘racking-of-brains’ by publishers to come up with other imaginative publishing models.
Comment. I don't think it's true that the RS will routinely deposit its Open Choice articles in PubMed Central. The first Open Choice article was deposited in PMC, but it was funded by the Wellcome Trust, which requires PMC deposit. An automatic deposit policy, at PMC or any other OA repository independent of the RS, would be very welcome, but the RS hasn'tn announced such a policy yet.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/24/2006 07:23:00 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.
