Update: Open access and the developing world

• Gadagkar is aware that many fee-based OA journals waive their fees in cases of economic hardship (although we should not confuse publication fees at OA journals with "page charges").  He's also aware that many funding agencies allow grantees use grant funds to pay the fees.  He finds these two mitigations insufficient and I won't comment on his criticisms.

To me Gadarkar's concerns about fee waivers pose the most significant challenge to an "author pays" model for open access. Publishing costs money, so authors able to pay to publish subsidize those who can't. In an scholarly endeavor that's not an unreasonable compromise, but it does mean either that most authors will have to find a way to pay authors' fees or that a smaller number of authors (and their funders) will have to pay a lot more than the actual costs to publish their work. "Why should anyone want to survive on charity?" Gadagkar argues that it is demeaning for authors unable to pay fees associated with their publications to depend on charity. Who am I to argue with Gadagkar about how scientists in the developing world will feel?

• But he is apparently unaware that most OA journals charge no publication fees at all.  To repeat the data from my previous post (coincidentally relevant here):  as of late 2007, 67% of the journals listed in the DOAJ charged no publication fees, and 83% of OA journals from society publishers charged no publication fees.  He says that "A 'publish for free, read for free' model may one day prove to be viable..." as if it were untried, when in fact it is the majority model around the world.  Moreover, it's the exclusive model in his own country.  To the best of my knowledge, all OA journals published in India are of the no-fee variety.

Fair enough. Most open access journals charge no publication fees at all. But I just looked over the 130 journal titles in the biology list of the Directory of Open Access Journals. Of those, I can honestly report that the only ones I've ever looked at for my research are those from BioMedCentral and those from Public Library of Science. Both of those are open access under an "author pays" model. Fees range from $195 to $2675 for article processing fees at BioMedCentral and from $1250 to $2500 at PLoS.² In short, if my reading habits are representative, for work that I publish to have a chance of getting noticed by my peers in an open access journal, it's likely to have to appear in an "author pays" open access journal.³

• Finally, it's important to remember that OA archiving already follows the model of no fees for readers and no fees for authors, and it works equally well for unrefereed preprints and refereed postprints.  Just this week, the OA repository at Gadagkar's employer, the Indian Institute of Science, passed the milestone of 10,000 deposits. 

This point is indisputable, and I think it points the way to an open access model that will work in the near term. Many journals (including Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) make their articles open free of charge six months after publication (although they may close that window again after awhile). Self-archiving helps to accomplish the same goal. It's not ideal, but it's a step in the right direction.

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¹I'm on a research trip to South Africa. I don't have a lot of time for blogging, and the Internet connection can be a bit slow when I do have time.
²Except for authors at member institutions.
³I know that there's research showing that open access leads to higher citation, but I wonder how much of that effect is due to high-profile journals like those published by PLoS and to open access articles in subscription publications like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If anyone knows, I'd love to learn the answer.