Like others here, I am completely fed up with the "science spam" ... new journals and new conferences being created overnight leading to hundreds of emails offering me jobs I did not ask for. And many without an "unsubscribe" option. These people clearly use the same practices as other unethical groups to search out email addresses and spray out their messages looking for naive 'customers'.

That said, I have no doubt that online Open Access is with us forever. But we need to ask, "what are the issues?" Here is my list:

1) Quality ... already mentioned by others and, rightly so, listed as the priority; without it, we all risk wasting out precious resources following up on misleading reports; the fact that you have pay up front is obviously a risk (but we have had page charges for a while);

2) Perpetuity: one of the strengths of paper journals was that they would up in thousands of libraries all around the world, safely stored for the long term; how can we be confident that, when an online publisher fails, we will not lose everything that has been "published"?

3) Where does the money go? Many of the traditional journals belonged to science societies and profits were turned back into the society to benefit of members and students; the societies also had a vested interest in the maintenance of quality; the advent of large publishing companies who saw and siezed the opportunity to take massive amounts of money of science funding have held science to ransom for decades now, creating new journals, buying up others and then forcing libraries to purchase them all as a package; my own university library is forced to purchase journals, some of the horrifically expensive, that no-one will read; these companies put nothing back into the science community; worse, they are now hitting us twice by adding page charges! The libraries of the world's wealthiest universities are now hitting back at this. Finally. No wonder life has been difficult for smaller universities.

Open access journal are good as readers, but a heavy burden for scientists from countries with constraints in research budgets.

Open access journals make it that much easier for scientists and students to research important and timely topics. Sharing and collaboration make scientific discoveries and advancement all the more likely to happen.

Sorry, I fail to see how OA journals "to research important and timely topics" that classical journals with high impact factor do not, and usually at lesser publication prices for the scientist? After all, as a reader you can always ask a reprint to the author! I have also noticed that editorial tasks are pretty chaotic, and there are reviews from people that were not chosen "the choice" of the editors: you end up wondering how can this guy speaks on that topic which is not his specialty! I do not mean to say that this is the rule but seems to be quite frequent. Finally, some OA papers seem to be a little rushed upon. Fast publication should not be equated to lower quality of the paper.

Interjecting new ideas stimulates scientific research and discovery.

Yes, open access journalsm will help all scientific data will known rapidly and easier specially for sciantist of the their wolrd. A good oportunity for everyone.

I am for OA journals. Because how ever their publications are not comparable with NO journals, but they makes easier to get them

I would not agree that articles published in OA journals are not comparable with NO journals; articles published in PLoS Biology/Genetics and Genome Biology are frequently of the caliber of articles found in NO journals of comparable stature such as Genome Research and Genes & Development. With the launch of eLife by HHMI (and looking at the first few articles that they have published), OA journals will continue to become more competitive with NO journals.

Also, I would argue that OA publications such as PLoS ONE serve an important function in providing a venue for the publication of negative results and results whose significance is unclear at the time of publication.

It is true that open access journals make the needed information easily available to readers, particualrly researchers and graduate students, who do n ot have access to such information published in non-open journals. Moreover, all the open access journals are published online and they can be published as soon as the review process is complete as they do not have to wait for a year or more after being accepted. Such waiting time is common for most of the conventional printed journals.

However, the way some of the open access journals are reviewed and published raises concern on the level of stringency on the review process. Two issues of major concern are 1) Most of the open access journals do not show their physical address i.e. where they are located and who is behind the publication. In my opinion, there should be a body that is responsible for all matters related to what the journal is doing. 2) Most often the journal editors send papers to be reviewed to individuals who do not have the expertise in the field of study in which a paper has been submitted. This raises a question, whether they are serious in the business of journal editing or not. Therefore, although I am in favor of proliferation of open access online journals, I also have concern regarding the quality of the papers published in some of these journals. If this concern is properly addressed and the open access online journals prove their credibility in their publication policy and review process, they could be the main outlets in the future.

It seems that open acess on line journals have many advatages in terms of easy acess and quick reponse and defintely it save so much time to publish an article after reviewing.On other hand it is not costly and offers an extra space for publication.It has opned new channels for young researchers and scientist from countries or institutions who or which can not subscribe in a conventional costly printed journal.Some people have concerns about the quality of research in such journals .I see no eviedence that non acess journals puplish only high quality research since there are some poor publications in non acess journals too.

Open access or not, It all comes down to the quality of published work, not necessarily (or always) a synonymous of impact index.

There is a factor that needs to be considered, the cost of publication. OA usually transfer responsibility to the authors for the "costs" of publication (sometimes with waivers... but not always). Non-OA (publishers) are in this for the business not necessarily for the quality of science

In my opinion, OA journals make science more democratic and available the public without additional cost (in most cases the public has paid for the science through taxes).

So for me the final question would be: how are we making sure the quality of the science is good?

Hi Juan,

You write that "Non-OA publishers are in this for the business", and I'm not sure I get that distinction between non-OA and OA publishers. Especially with the recent explosion of more or less bogus OA journals popping up left and right. To me it seems that a lot of people running scams have realized that there's money to be made on naive scientists who think nothing of paying thousands of dollars to some website which claims to be an open access journal ;-).

What I'm wondering is how OA publishing is affecting the relation between the "poor" and the "rich" parts of the research community? We (the rich) are being told (e.g. by our research councils) that we should publish in OA in order for the poor to be able to read our papers. It follows that those who can only afford to read OA journals, will only cite OA journals, and thus contribute to the high IFs of the OA journals, which is great for us who can afford to publish there.

So is OA publication becoming a "window" for the poor to look into as see what the rich have published (and then cite them)?

I hear a lot of my colleagues talk about how quick and easy it is to publish in OA journals like PlosOne. If so, have we created a system (OA) where you can basically pay your way into a quick publication in a high impact journal?

Hi Thrandur,

That was the point of my little disquisition, in the end is it all about how good the science is? Probably not.

I think we should take every step to make science (and access to science) as democratic as possible, by principle. As such OA is good in theory. However, how we implement the idea is essential to the outcome. Quality should be in my opinion our main concern and I'm not sure we are taken (or are able to take) the measures to ensure quality in published work.

Your comment on RG scores in RGate the other day came to my mind. In the present contexts and in the name of "objectivity" (?!) I feel we have handed judgement to a metrics system (IFs, h -index and so on...) and by doing so transferred our responsibility and our ability to judge quality of published work (at least to some extent).

Unfortunately as you say, we throw thousands of dollars to publish OA and make our work available to everybody (the poor that cannot afford to pay subscriptions to Non-OA journals) and feel very pleased..... I will take it an step further, isn't it a bit cynic?

Bottom line: Do we want to publish OA for the right reasons? or just because we think it is easier? I think this is the real discussion

I agree with Fuentes and Thrandur that OA publishing is a bit like paid advertising in a political campaign. The richer candidate has an advantage.

Quality is an enormous issue for me. I have published a fair amount in my field which is occupational health specializing in ergonomics and gender. I have gotten about thirty offers to be on editorial boards of OA journals in all sorts of areas entirely unrelated to my specialty : law, psychiatry, cardiovascular health. Obviously none of these people even googled me or did a PubMed search to find out what I do.

Also, with the proliferation of these journals and the overloading of academics the number of available qualified reviewers is inadequate for the demand. Again, I get asked (probably by a computer with no human intermediary) to review articles outside my field all the time.

I think what it comes down to is that someone, somewhere has to pay for publication. Would we be as willing to pay OA fees if the review process was as rigorous as the fee for access journals? Many have discussed the ease and speed of publication in an OA journal, which does suggest that the review processes are not rigorous. That can then bring the quality of the science into question. Others have spoken of linking OA with the democracy in science (allowing poorer people to access quality science). Is providing less rigorously reviewed science democratic? Does it serve the quality and promotion of science in less wealthy countries to have the science available for access to not go through the rigorous processes of fee for access journals?

The future is in journals on the Internet.

Like others here, I am completely fed up with the "science spam" ... new journals and new conferences being created overnight leading to hundreds of emails offering me jobs I did not ask for. And many without an "unsubscribe" option. These people clearly use the same practices as other unethical groups to search out email addresses and spray out their messages looking for naive 'customers'.

That said, I have no doubt that online Open Access is with us forever. But we need to ask, "what are the issues?" Here is my list:

1) Quality ... already mentioned by others and, rightly so, listed as the priority; without it, we all risk wasting out precious resources following up on misleading reports; the fact that you have pay up front is obviously a risk (but we have had page charges for a while);

2) Perpetuity: one of the strengths of paper journals was that they would up in thousands of libraries all around the world, safely stored for the long term; how can we be confident that, when an online publisher fails, we will not lose everything that has been "published"?

3) Where does the money go? Many of the traditional journals belonged to science societies and profits were turned back into the society to benefit of members and students; the societies also had a vested interest in the maintenance of quality; the advent of large publishing companies who saw and siezed the opportunity to take massive amounts of money of science funding have held science to ransom for decades now, creating new journals, buying up others and then forcing libraries to purchase them all as a package; my own university library is forced to purchase journals, some of the horrifically expensive, that no-one will read; these companies put nothing back into the science community; worse, they are now hitting us twice by adding page charges! The libraries of the world's wealthiest universities are now hitting back at this. Finally. No wonder life has been difficult for smaller universities.

As a big fan of open access journals I have to comment on this topic. :-)

First: The quality of science published in open access journals may be an issue, however, as it is with many very new things, journals publishing bad science will loose creditability fairly quickly and most certainly never get an impact factor. BTW I don´t think that the majority of submitted papers is rejected because the science is not good, but because the importance is considered to be not high enough.

Second: The rich and poor issue. Most (large) open access publisher (e.g. PLOS, BMC) don´t charge publishing fees to people from poor countries (or at least its cheaper for them). You can look up their list, its pretty long. If you pay the fee or not has no impact on the decision of the editor (in PLOS the editor doesn´t even see this information, at least they claim that). So, I would argue that open access is a chance for both sides (the "poor" and the "rich") in both ways (access and publishing).

Third: The life span of online journals. I´m not sure about this point, some online journals may not be that reliable (as some of the new tiny ones are more scam than real), however, all open access journals which are tracked by Thomson Reuters have to maintain access to their papers, although when they are not active anymore. So, I don´t see a problem here. BTW also books can get lost...

I´m certain that open access will take over in the future, driven by higher IF and broader distribution. Maybe some subdisciplines will resist longer, e.g. taxonomy, where you have to have a hardcopy of the journal (that was the rule for animal taxonomy the last time I checked). But overall the future is online and open access!

I admire the unbridled enthusiasm for OA publication seen in several of the comments above. However, I still find it a bit simplistic only to worry about the quality of the publications coming out of OA, and not question the quality of the editorial process or the publishing fee system which is resulting in an rapidly increasing number of OA journals which are just simple scams.

Earlier, I mentioned the topic of "the rich and the poor" and Lukas comments on this above. I carry out my research in one of the "rich" countries (Sweden) and therefore I have to pay the full publishing fees. I publish 6-8 papers a year, which would mean about 20.000 US$ in publishing fees annually, 60.000 US$ on a three-year research grant. This is simply A LOT OF MONEY, irrespective of my funding situation, and I know for a fact that many of my "rich" colleagues with whom I co-publish say, "no way I'm going to spend 2000$ on publishing a single paper".

The underlying problem is that a significant part of most peoples academic research funding is being taken as an overhead. A part of this is covering the cost of our libraries, which need to pay horrendous subscription rates for the non-OA publications. So now we're not only screwed one way, but two ways by the greedy publishing companies. We're paying for the subscriptions of all the classical non-OA journals, while at the same time being enticed not to publish in these same journals, but to use a substantial part of our funding to pay up front for publications in OA.

I think publishing in OA has a lot to do with our vanity as scientists, wanting to publish quickly in relatively high IF journals and being able to brag about it, as its the "in" thing to do.

I also know for a fact that there are a lot of scientists who are active in the so-called rich countries, both Europe and USA, who simply can't afford OA publications because of the economic realities we live in, and even if they could, will much rather spend that kind of money on conference attendance, where you can present your findings in person to your colleagues, or to buy reagents for more experiments.

PS. All this said, I of course, agree with the principal concept of making publications widely accessible. That's why I upload my papers on ResearchGate even if it may be a breach of copyright laws, and I'm happy to see how many have downloaded these already.

I also always send my papers as pdf files to anyone requesting my papers, just as I sent out printed reprints earlier.

So for everyone who doesn't have access to journals on-line, simply request the papers from the authors!

Well put, Björn. Money does not grow on trees in 'wealthy universities'. For this reason, I insist that my students first consider free journals that belong to non-profit, learned societies. That usually means avoiding US journals! But the cost of publishing can be as high as an entire PhD experiment and, in my view, the US science system (and Elsevier et al) don't need my increasingly scarce research funding.

Thanks Graeme for supporting my views and good to hear your comments. Sometimes I feel it's so politically incorrect to question the OA publication system, when we only hear a choir of praise, which I feel lacks the critical analysis.

I absolutely agree with Björn and Graeme.

I should spend more money to get published a paper in an OA journal than I spend to carry out my investigation. This does not make sense at all.

Moreover, OA do not make publications more accessible than requesting the papers from the authors. In fact I do not understand why people are so delighted with OA.

@Francisco, Graeme and Björn:

Of course, nobody wants to spend that much money for publishing research. But the payment-system is not that different to the "traditional" one (and I think will take over in the future):

- In the traditional way the university library is paying to have access to certain journals and spending a tremendous amount of money in order to do this, most often publishers only let you buy packages with different journals, where some of those the library doesn´t even want. From all what I have heard those journal-packages become more and more expensive.

- On the other hand a university can become a member of one (or more) of the online access publishing groups like BMC or PLOS. Of course, the university has to pay for that, however, all students and faculty of this particular university can now publish for free in all of the journals of this particular publishers.

Therefore its a political decision each university has to make: Do I rather have access to all journals of e.g. Springer or do I provide the opportunity for my researchers to publish for free in high IF journals e.g. from the BMC series.

Emailing authors and receiving the papers this way is certainly a good way to get papers in most cases, however, it does slow down your work (e.g. because of delays - you have to wait for a response - and you cannot easily skim through papers, because for each paper you have to write an email to get it). Also, I think if public money is used for research, the public should have access to the results of it, e.g. if you read a newspaper about a scientific discovery and you would try to read the original paper (just for fun) you would probably not email the authors.

Also the generally high IF of open access papers show that there IS a real restriction to access non-open access journals. And most researchers want that reading their papers is as easy as possible for as many people as possible. More than that, open access papers usually accept every paper that fits their standards and restrictions (there are no limiting page numbers or something like that) and the papers get processed very fast - you don´t waste have a year to wait for a decision (or even much longer...).

Even though I DO see potential problems with OA journals (especially with "scam-OA-journals), I think online OA journals will be the way to go in the future and it will become more and more important (even Nature publishing group started an OA journal recently). Especially when universities start to adapt their policies for it.

We look at OA journals when we have a paper that we expect to elicit alot of feedback pro and con. The ease of that feedback is an advantage with journals such as PLoS. I also have thoughts about the long term retrievability of on-line papers (vrs paper stored in libraries) but I think this is yet to be determined. The costs of publishing in OA are not trivial but I have been surprised by some of the extremely high quality and constructive review that we've received. It was perhaps a bit faster than hard copy, society based journals but now that many free journals also publish on line that is less of an issue.

I heard that 70% of the scientific publications would come out from the OA journal from one of my librarians. I am not sure if it would be real or not, but I can see that several percent of publications in 2012 has come out from the leader of OA journal, PLoS One. I think that would be the movement to the next generation.

Sorry.

Ten years later, the situation would be completely changed, that is the story what I heard. One of my friends, the librarian of our university predicted that 70% of the scientific publications would come out from the OA journal around ten years later.

I believe open access journals will have a significant role to play in the future. However, today the problem is how to distinguish between those which are striving to genuinely promote dissemination of scientific findings and those whose main motive is making money?

The technology is taking over gradually cost effective creation of human through printing media. Future scientific journals will be on line. May be one copy by publisher will publish and keep in his stock or electronic Media must be kept secure for future reference. all scientific journals are now a days finding difficulty to supply printed one because of high cost, space,low manpower in libraries, and poor patronage. So they have started giving full journals on line but keeping few original articals in price list only. I am sure within coming ten fifteen years it will be sea change in scientific journals. P.C.GHOSH

I think that there is a certain money flow to be discussed in this matter.

the researchers who want to stay update to the current knowledge has to pay to get to the published papers of their coleagues. on the other hand the, the researcher who does a research has to pay to be published. i see the flow of money only in one direction. not long ago this was not the case. the journaly charging for publishing were quite rare. what changed and is this all right with everyone?

i stand for the policy in which there is no need to charge money to the authors that publish their work and lower prices for the published papers! regarding the OA journals i think that they should exist and that the time will show what each of them worth, just as was the case with the non-open ones. as in any other evolution, there is no gain without diversity :)

In a slightly different direction: Over my career, I have published many invited reviews that have been refereed, often as part of major conference proceedings. These articles usually end up as chapters in books. In some circumstances, these books are a regular production (every 1-4 years) so libraries might have them. However, in most cases, the books disappear into the ether, are rarely cited (and thus, I presume, rarely read) and are perhaps never seen again except on eBay. Certainly, in the modern era of electronic access, they offer very little. Often, the editing and production takes more than 12 months, by which time much of the discussion can be out of date. One such case pains me in particular: a 1992 review into which my postdocs and I put a lot of energy and imagination, and risked a lot of our novel ideas. We were initially told that this would article would be published in a special edition of a regular journal. It ended up in a relatively obscure book. As a consequence, now I put little effort into such writings and I warn my team mates to be wary of releasing their ideas. Sad. But in these days of measurement by citation and extreme competition for research funds, I am wondering if science books are dead. I have thus decided to place PDFs of final drafts of these chapters on my ResearchGate site. I don't need the citations (I'm an old guy) but it is somehow satisfying to know that they are more accessible.

Dear Björn,

I very much agree with your point of view, being on the other side of the "window".

I'd like to add a small point to what you wrote.

While open access is great, you only get citations if you publish in open access journals. In case you cannot pay the horrendous fees, your contribution will remain unnoticed. Our funding agencies and Universities want us to publish in ISI indexed journals but do not provide the necessary funding to do so.

Therefore, I am forced to apply for waivers when trying to publish in any serious journal. What I noticed, though, is that once you apply for such a waiver (usually during submission), the manuscript is doomed to rejection (usually quite quick) and generally, review commentary is poor to questionable.

What kind of experience did you make when applying for waivers of publication or open access fees?

In respect to the initial question, a recent call from Haward (http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/articles/2012/04/28/harvard_pushes_back_against_academic_publishers_pricing_encourages_open_access/) comes to mind which shows the problems even rich Universities are facing.

Personally, I would want to publish in open access journals as it increases the visibility and reach of your publication. Others may come to the same conclusion which will slowly lead to decreased interest in closed publication journals which will consequently render them obsolete at one point.

Jens, my experience with asking for waivers was the same as yours. So, only under the rarest of circumstances do i make a strategic decision to pay publication charges.

I think after 10 years the majority of journals will turn on open access

Dear Jens, Thanks for noticing my critical concerns on this issue and providing a pretty chilling comment from the side of the scientific community which can ill afford the OA publications fees (I also note that Graeme Martin have the same experience).

It is, of course, completely horrendous if there is in fact a link between rejection rate and requests for publication fee waivers. Of course, all OA journals will vehemently deny this, but as somebody said "being paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you" ;-)

Jokes aside, this is a very serious issue, as most all European granting agencies (including the EU Commission) are jumping on the train demanding open access publications.

I've been publishing for 30 years and, of course, most has been in non OA. Does this mean that nobody has seen my research or cited it? I doubt it when I check with ISI (see attachment), but as a further precaution, I've uploaded most all of my papers on RG, so now they must all be OA, right?!

Dear Youssef Attia, Your comment is the standard one, it's not difficult to foresee this trend. My question is, will you be able to afford to publish your own research in open access (I don't know the funding situation in Egypt)? Or will you ask for a waiver from the OA publication fees, which really means that somebody else is paying for it?

Open access is great for me, as I can freely access many publications. It is also great for the authors as they'll be highly cited since there are no obstacles to reach to their publications.

When preparing a review article Björn, how much do you get out of your way to get an article that you would like to include?

I, for one, do the Google search and if that turns up without results I stop right there, unless I think the article is extremely important in which case I'll email the authors or ask a colleague at a different University who may have access to the journal. I have to admit that I would not put more effort than this. I believe, that most of us will work similarly and that is why open access publications will be cited more (despite the stats you posted above). There are plenty of large Universities which can afford to subscribe to a variety of journals and thus you are being cited. Additionally, there may be some second hand citations of colleagues who never actually read your work.

Open Access Fees

So now that we established that open access publications are great (IMHO), bear with me a few more sentences when I consider the fees.

1) Scientists are doing science (funded by taxpayer)

2) Scientists review publications (unpaid)

3) Scientists pose as editors (usually unpaid)

4) Scientists read publications (and taxpayer pays for it)

5) Scientists give their name and their time to run a journal (usually unpaid)

6) Many journals are pure online journals today (lets assume $1000 for hosting)

Where are my up to $3000 open access fees going?

Sure there may be some secretaries and some administrative processes in the journals. But behold, are they on a per journal or rather on a per publisher basis? Just check out which are the industries with largest growth currently and you will stumble across many publishing houses (Remember Dire Straits - Money for nothing?).

What is to stop scientists from using University web space to create their own online journals?

Here is one: indexing in ISI. I really wonder how Thomson Scientific, a company, positioned itself such that no other indexing service seems to be important. And it is not publish or perish anymore but to be indexed by ISI or not to be. At least that is what I am able to observe here where everything is about "ISI publications" and impact factors.

Anyone knows the terms and conditions for a journal to be indexed in ISI vs for example Google Scholar?

So what are we to do about this?

Get together as a department or on a larger scale and start you own journal and host it on the University website.

Maybe one of these days we'll be able to break the deadlock and have free, universally accessible scientific exchange again.

Dear Björn Thrandur Björnsson, funding for publication is difficult and publication without paying is also very hard, the point should be in open access journal ~ 50% of publication should be free of charge, but regulation to these should be developed by scientific community and should be applied by law or act number so that the published don't turn it to money making process instead of spreading of knowledge process, I believe

Yes!

Dear Youssef. I'm happy to agree with your idealistic vision. Unfortunately, I live in a society of market capitalism where all the major publishing houses such as Elsevier and Springer are private companies which neither governments nor the scientific community has any chance to do anything about. Just like any other companies, they set their own pricing policies, and they're of course set to maximize the profit of the shareholders through demanding high fees for OA publications at the same time as they have the university libraries pay extravagantly for non OA journal subscriptions. It's easy enough to say this should be changed and shout Yes! but in the real world we live in, I'm concerned about spending increasingly large portion of my funding on publication costs rather than the research itself.

This is precisely why I tell my students that we will first target journals owned and run by science societies. Often no page charges, and if there are charges, at least the money appears to go in the right direction. Maybe that is easier for me because of my field (hormones and reproduction). Elsevier is a last resort.

BTW, Björn, I just noted you are in Göteborg. My great grandfather came from there to Australia (and stayed) in the 1860s (I think). I am part viking!

I was in Freising, TUM, 2002, Munchen, as a visiting professor for several months. I agree with you Graeme Martin why the big university in Euro and States starter their own journals and people can gradually move to for publication and by time can get IF, instead of spending too much money in publication fees as most of the process is done the scientist starter from doing the work and ending with editing and correction, thus these houses only do printing

I appreciate all comments about OA Journals. We now could understand the predicament of Scientists living in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) whose research funding is poor, needs to conduct studies that meet international standards (not necessarily the requirements of his or her environment) and then publish findings in "reputable" journals indexed by ISI and others. Given such situations, OA journals provide alternative and cheaper avenue for scientists to express themselves and access scientific information cheaply.

Want to see some data on where your publishing money goes? Go here:

http://bit.ly/Wxo4VA

Hi Graeme, fellow viking! Thanks for sharing these horrendous figures for the profit margins of the major scientific publishing houses. In the era before OA, one could fairly easily avoid journals with high page charges. Now, when we're all being herded into OA publishing by rapidly spreading policy decisions by national research councils, universities as well as international funding bodies such as the European Commission, I cannot but wonder what lobbying activities have resulted in the fact that for every 1000$ we (and thus the funding agencies) pay for OA publishing, 350-400$ go straight into the pockets of the shareholders of companies like Springer, Elsevier and Wiley.

Although I'm living in Sweden, I'm Icelandic and thus a decedent of the vikings that moved away from Norway when the king started to raise taxes. So maybe it's in my blood that while I want to pay my dues, I only want to do so when I know that taxes and fees are being used for the good of the people. And I think the scientific community is currently being robbed blind by through the OA fees.

Dear Kevin Amaefule,

I don't understand the part of your argument where you say that "OA journals provide alternative and cheaper avenue for scientists to express themselves" as there are a lot of highly reputable non-OA journals indexed in ISI which provide publication free of charge.

The open access fees are indeed robbing us blind - but hopefully as more and more go OA this will become more competitive and reasonable. I think everything should be open access - all science should be in the public domain for free.

R.I.P. Aaron Scwartz

Good sentiment, Goran. Our little please for academic freedom look pale against the person who committed his life to it. He might appear to have lost, at the age of 26. Lets hope not.

thanx Greame, i was shocked to learn that student debt in USA reached 1 billion USD, and that most of it goes to the problem of "literature". Aaron made a noble gesture i am happy that there is more people who simphatise with him!

Open access is all right. However, the problem is who would evaluate the value of science. Unfortunately, there is a absolute raking of the journal by the impact factor, which affects a lot to the chance of the scientific funding. Therefore, the publications already becomes money game. If we can separate the value of publication from the standard from the funding competition, that would be ideal. The issue who would evaluate the value of the publication would tightly connect to the scientific funding issue.

There is a trend that is accepting open access formats, which is why journals are offereing open access option at article level.

You may want to have a look at a new site, which is testing future directions in scholarly publishing for ecology, evolutionary biology, and the earth, ocean and environmental sciences.

http://openpub.org/

Absolutely and should be

I am also of opinion that there should be open access journals in future, even if there are so many close access journals which accept the research paper free of cost, but these type of journals are a few.

I concur with leena

Open journals comes in different flavors. Some charge high publication fees and high subscription fees, but other charge moderate publication fees and subscription is free. One very popular option on currently restricted journals is to offer an open publication option for a fee. So there is also no clear cut line between open and "traditional" journals. It is also possible that other systems paralel to JCR may be also popular after some time. Would not the money paid or the prestige of the journal, but the quality of a paper would serve as a basis for evaluation seems promising. Well see what is the whole direction of this transformations after some time.

Interesting input from everyone. Though, the importance of the open access journals cannot be truly realized until and unless you are sitting in a third world country without the resources to read that article that is so crucial to your dissertation. Thank God for avenues like RG where we can atleast request the authors themselves. Otherwise there would be no way of getting that information

You only get citations if you publish in open access journals, but the quality of a paper would serve as a basis for evaluation seems promising.

Thank you Graeme,

I am in agreement with you. However we have to see the laboratories that set up every day in the world and look to many scientists that are graduated from these and previous laboratories, They can think and assay and write and submit to publish. Do you think that the societies' organizations can cover all of these new conditions? I think we have to accept the formation of a large business in this area, because the requests are rose up every day. Here scoring and quality assessment of the journals may be changed in future.

Dear Behnam,

I think that part of the market will become open access.

Some researchers talk about the need for proper interpretation of results (not everybody can understand, interpret and comment on scientific studies and results, as well as their limitations and experimental design's effects/bias); and this is true. However, in my opinion, there is no much sense to close science (other than Journal's profitability), and technical people (veterinarians, in my case) should have access to scientific information due to two reasons: (1) it will helpt society's development; (2) science is supported by public subsidies (through taxes).

Moreover, researchers try to get visibility and be cited, and open access helps. In my case, I use to publish in Editorials with Open Access.

Of course, implications and reasons against and in favor are of weight and numeorus.

Regards,

Alfredo.