Your Commentaries on ‘How to survive the recession’ devote much discussion to the effects of the global recession on science (Nature 457, 957–963; 2009). However, the financial squeeze may also be affecting the publication output of research institutions in a more subtle way. It could be boosting the traditional reader-pays publication model for scientific journals at the expense of the author-pays, or open-access, model....
They are therefore struggling to emerge and to attract the most prestigious research findings.
This situation could deteriorate further if open-access journals are forced to move to (partial) site licensing in order to cover their production costs — a shift recently undertaken by the Journal of Visualized Experiments, for example — as authors become increasingly reluctant or unable to pay in the current financial climate.
Some publishers have adopted a scheme that allows authors to post their unformatted, accepted manuscripts on their institutional repositories, rendering conventional articles de facto open access without added cost. Encouraging authors to use this right would prevent further dampening of the move towards openly sharing scientific knowledge, to the benefit of all.
Comments
Aerts is right that the recession is no obstacle to OA archiving and that authors should be encouraged to seize the opportunity. However, I wouldn't call green OA a "scheme...adopted by publishers". Most TA publishers do allow it, but only authors can do it, and a growing number of funders and universities require it. BTW, it's also misleading to speak of fee-based OA journals as if they constituted all OA journals, when they don't constitute even a majority.
While the financial crisis will hurt OA in some respects, it could foster and stimulate OA in other respects. See my predictions for 2009.
Update (4/28/09). Also see Bill Hooker's comments, emphasizing that most OA journals charge no publication fees.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/22/2009 05:37:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
