Open Access Day

Today's the day, Open Access Day, an "opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content."

The founding partners are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

I've written before that "[o]pen access is a friend who deserves our help and support," but I've also pointed out some of the challenges facing open access, particularly the "author pays" model of open access.¹ Peter Suber points out that the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers just released its third survey on scholarly publishing practice. One item in the press release caught my eye.

Open access advocacy has clearly had an effect on publishers' thinking. The proportion of publishers offering optional open access to authors has grown from 9% in 2005 to 30% in 2008. However, the take-up of the author pays open access option is exceedingly low. (emphasis mine)

In spite of the high profile that PLoS journals have, it's still not clear that an "author pays" model of immediate open access is sustainable. That doesn't mean open access is a bad idea, and it doesn't mean that we should dampen efforts to make access to scholarly research as broadly available as possible. It does mean that "author pays" may not be the way to do it. Open archiving is much more promising.