Academic Publishing - Open Access Journals

Open Access Journals

An alternative to the subscription model of journal publishing is the Open access journal model, also known as "author-pays" or "paid on behalf of the author", where a publication charge is paid by the author, his university, or the agency which provides his research grant. The online distribution of individual articles and academic journals then takes place without charge to readers and libraries. Most Open access journals remove all the financial, technical, and legal barriers that limit access to academic materials to paying customers. The Public Library of Science and BioMed Central are prominent examples of this model.

Open access has been criticized on quality grounds, as the desire to obtain publishing fees could cause the journal to relax the standard of peer review. It may be criticized on financial grounds as well, because the necessary publication fees have proven to be higher than originally expected. Open access advocates generally reply that because open access is as much based on peer reviewing as traditional publishing, the quality should be the same (recognizing that both traditional and open access journals have a range of quality). It has been argued that good science done by academic institutions who cannot afford to pay for open access might not get published at all, but most open access journals permit the waiver of the fee for financial hardship or authors in underdeveloped countries. Moreover, all authors have the option of self-archiving their articles in their institutional repositories in order to make them open access whether or not they publish in an open access journal.

If they publish in a Hybrid open access journal, authors pay a subscription journal a publication fee to make their individual article open access. Other articles in such hybrid journals are either made available after a delay, or remain available only by subscription. Many of the traditional publishers (including Wiley-Blackwell, Wiley-VCH, Oxford University Press, Springer Science+Business Media and Wharton School Publishing) have already introduced such a hybrid option, and more are following. Proponents of open access suggest that such moves by corporate publishers illustrate that open access, or a mix of open access and traditional publishing, can be financially viable, and evidence to that effect is emerging. It remains unclear whether this is practical in fields outside the sciences, where there is much less availability of outside funding. In 2006, several funding agencies, including the Wellcome Trust and several divisions of the Research Councils in the UK announced the availability of extra funding to their grantees for such open access journal publication fees.