I think that some journals that are published by huge monopols, like elsevier, finally cost agencies and universities the same or more than open access journals.

The question with open access publishing is - whether scientific quality is maintained or whether 90% of all papers are anyway published. Then it becomes a matter who has the most money and can submit the most papers to Open access journals. However, I also like the idea that everybody in the world, whether poor or rich, has access to scientific knowledge....

For a summary of reasons why one may not publish in certain jounrlas, see

http://www.lscp.net/persons/ramus/en/FREE.html

There are different kinds of research stakeholders, e.g. private and public funding agencies. Leaving the private ones aside the public agencies should keep in mind the overall spending of the public authorities, which also use parts of their budgets for academic libraries.

Open access means that one person/group/organisation pays and all other have access to the information and knowledge shared. Regarding the exorbitant fees that closed publishers demand from their subscriber's it should be clear that OA is a better way to spend money for publishing publicly funded work. That said it is also important to choose good journals publishing with open access, i.e. journals with a trustful editorial board and rigorous peer review process. Authors funded should beware of predatory OA publishers.

There's a lot going on some OA threads here, see for example

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Should_open_access_publications_be_encouraged

For all those interested in questions concerning OA publishing, publishing fees and how we're spending public funding for disseminating our data, the attached paper gives food for thought and a lot of background information.

I think the major publishing houses have been extremely successful in lobbying the concept of OA to the point that it has almost become politically incorrect to question OA. As the basic philosophy of OA is so noble, nobody dares to question the enormous profit margins of the publishing monopolies.

Article The siege of science

@Susanne: I understand the dynamics of an OA fee being charged (to producers) in lieu of a subscription fee (to consumers), and the prices of journal subscriptions rising. What I don't understand is why some funding agencies are becoming so philanthropic so as to demand their authors to publish OA. What's in it for them?

@Michael: Ah, I get why public agencies would; but why would private? And here I'm assuming private agencies are funding regular researchers, not ones employed by them/commissioned to do research for them.

@Bjorn: Thank you for the paper and for the politically incorrect angle to the situation; shall read it :)

I think the funding agencies are simply doing the politically correct thing - it looks good. At the same time, they're turning a blind eye to the fact that an ever increasing portion of the public funding which is supposed to go to research is going straight into the pockets of the big publishing houses, which I'm sure spend a part of that money on political lobbying.

Well, @Hansika, then the question remains, why there is any private funding at all?

Is it their interest in being acknowledged within publications that show up to the general public (OA) and not just to the groups able to access closed journals (looking good as @Bjoern said above)? Is it because of mingling their (commercial? political?) interests with those of the funded (I doubt your overall assumption)? Or, Altruism?

As you mentioned, a commercial interest may just be to add notes to their CSR. Or perhaps because of personal experiences ("my father died of cancer, let me fund cancer research"). Altruism seems a long shot, but can be masked by political interests too. I'm just curious as to why it'd make good economic sense to pay for OA for private funders. The only logical reason I can think of (in line with @Bjorn) is to build goodwill.

Agreed, I don't understand how the model is moving slowly from charging consumers of the information to charging producers. It's like charging a farmer for producing wheat. At the same time, the so-called increased citation count that OA allows may attract producers of (especially biomed) research to pay.

off course it results in more visualization of your research and to some extent more citations as well. I agree with the Hansika.

One of the "noble" arguments for OA is that "the rich" should make their research available to "the poor", and therefore, we (the rich) should not dare question the preposterous publication fees by the OA journals.

By uploading most of my papers on RG, I've created open access to them - and so far they've been downloaded >3500 times. But when I periodically look at the stats (which shows downloads by country over the last week), I see something quite curious. I always find that over 90% of the downloads are made in USA, and then mostly by other European countries. Only an insignificant amount of the downloads are made by the disadvantaged countries we're supposed to be helping by paying for OA publishing. So is the "increased visibility" by OA just a mirage?

@Bjorn, with respect to India, the trend of academic networking hasn't caught on yet. Which is probably why (save for the Life Sciences) several researchers aren't even aware of communities like RG or Academia. That said, OA helps those who scan the Internet to the nth to find the papers that are the most needed for their research. If any of your papers have been downloaded and set up on external links hosted by a user, then keeping track of downloads on RG isn't very reliable. And thank you for the papers :) Much appreciation.

Well, @Hansika, you commented further above in this thread "I don't understand how the model is moving slowly from charging consumers of the information to charging producers. It's like charging a farmer for producing wheat", but at the end of the day it's not like that. In academics we share ideas (at best, knowledge). If you share your idea with me, and I share mine with you - we both end up with two ideas. But if you give me a bunch of wheat (or an apple), and I give you mine, we both are left with only one item each.

So, it's much more rewarding to share ideas than apples (or wheat). Makes me wonder, is it that what makes OA so interesting to many? We don't distribute volumes of journals we have to pay for but ideas that are free for us to read.

You must've got me wrong - I'm a strong proponent of OA, and of sharing ideas and knowledge, be it at whatever cost to producers (who eventually are consumers too). The Bernard Shaw quote (I think it was him) is more true now than ever and OA is helping us attain the same. In academic utopia all knowledge would be free, but obviously that is not so. OA has its own charm, and not all of the charm is only for the beneficial motive to share ideas though - there are hidden agendas, by at least some components of the academic industry.

All research funded by the National Institutes of Health in the USA must be publicly accessible by law:

"The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008). The law states:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law."

See: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

For further details.