3 ms·

Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "auth

by p4bl0 12y ago

Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "authors choses" journal where you can pay to make your article freely available on the web but also choose the "free" closed access option. And yes, this means that universities still have to pay the subscriptions to these journals because not all of their papers are open access, so you end up paying one more time… I'm insisting here on the fact that publishers attempt to melt the notion of "open access" and "gold open access" with author processing charges, but this is manipulative propaganda (and sadly it works, lobbies at EU and in the US succeed in convincing politics and funding agencies that they have to pay to publish in "open access").

scott_s 12y ago
I was unaware that the old publishers had co-opted the label "open-access". But it is still true that some "true" open access journals require author fees - there's no free lunch.
p4bl0 12y ago
Sorry for the messed up formatting, I used a star in the parenthesis and at the beginning of the second paragraph to mark a footnote. I can't edit it anymore.
dougmccune 12y ago
Conflating OA with APCs isn't a nefarious PR campaign by the paywall publishers (disclaimer: I'm affiliated with one). It's the only way that anyone has shown is a sustainable model (so far). PLoS is the prime non-profit example, Hindawi is a for-profit OA example, and there are countless others that all focus on APCs being the mechanism to sustain OA publication (some call them different things, like PeerJ's membership model). Granted, I'm sure you can find examples of individual societies choosing to provide a high quality OA journal without the use of APCs, but that's the exception, not the rule. But overall the meteoric rise (and financial success) of non-profit PLoS seems like the biggest contributor to "OA = APCs".
- p4bl0 12y ago
  I really think what you say here is deeply ideological. As I explained in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657030), there exist ways to have high quality OA venues at a fraction of the cost per publication that are demanded by gold/APCs OA publishers. You can read more about these models by googling for Diamond Open Access and Platinum Open Access (and see very successful and large scale exemples such as SciELO and revues.org).

by p4bl0 12y ago

scott_s 12y ago

I was unaware that the old publishers had co-opted the label "open-access". But it is still true that some "true" open access journals require author fees - there's no free lunch.

p4bl0 12y ago

Sorry for the messed up formatting, I used a star in the parenthesis and at the beginning of the second paragraph to mark a footnote. I can't edit it anymore.

dougmccune 12y ago

Conflating OA with APCs isn't a nefarious PR campaign by the paywall publishers (disclaimer: I'm affiliated with one). It's the only way that anyone has shown is a sustainable model (so far). PLoS is the prime non-profit example, Hindawi is a for-profit OA example, and there are countless others that all focus on APCs being the mechanism to sustain OA publication (some call them different things, like PeerJ's membership model). Granted, I'm sure you can find examples of individual societies choosing to provide a high quality OA journal without the use of APCs, but that's the exception, not the rule. But overall the meteoric rise (and financial success) of non-profit PLoS seems like the biggest contributor to "OA = APCs".

p4bl0 12y ago
I really think what you say here is deeply ideological. As I explained in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657030), there exist ways to have high quality OA venues at a fraction of the cost per publication that are demanded by gold/APCs OA publishers. You can read more about these models by googling for Diamond Open Access and Platinum Open Access (and see very successful and large scale exemples such as SciELO and revues.org).