[Coral-List] More on open access
Charles Delbeek
delbeek at waquarium.org
Sun Apr 13 19:17:01 EDT 2008
Not to go into too great a discussion about this but I have to say I
find the logic behind most of their arguments rather questionable to say
the least.
Richard Dunne wrote:
> Coral Listers
>
>
> Herewith some informative passages from the PLos website:
>
> Why should I have to pay to publish my paper?
> It costs money to produce a peer-reviewed, edited, and formatted article
> that is ready for online publication, and to host it on a server that is
> accessible around the clock. Prior to that, a public or private funding
> agency has already paid a great deal more money for the research to be
> undertaken in the interest of the public. This real cost of "producing"
> a paper can be calculated by dividing your laboratory's annual budget by
> the number of papers published. We ask that—as a small part of the cost
> of doing the research—the author, institution, or funding agency pays a
> fee, to help cover the actual cost of the essential final step, the
> publication. (As it stands, authors now often pay for publication in the
> form of page or color charges.) Many funding agencies now support this view.
>
> More than US$2000 is a lot to pay to publish an article, isn't it?
> Not when you consider the cost of the research that led to the article.
> Publication fees of $2000 or $2500 are a small fraction of the costs of
> doing research, and it makes sense for funding agencies to include these
> fees in research grants. Many funding agencies now support this view.
> They recognize that publishing is an integral part of the research
> process - and if the work is published OA it will deliver the maximum
> possible impact, which in turn maximizes the outcome of the funder's
> investment in research.
>
> Ultimately, the fees that PLoS charge reflect the costs associated with
> publishing. We are not in this to make a profit - our bottom line is to
> make the literature a public resource. The administration of peer
> review, copy editing, production of high-quality tagged electronic
> files, web hosting, and so on are expensive processes. They are many of
> the same processes that are used in traditional subscription journals.
> If the money that currently supports subscription journals can be
> re-routed to cover publication fees then we will be able to support open
> access publishing in a fully sustainable way.
>
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