Yahoo published yesterday the story
Scientists Push for Open Access Publishing. I thought they were going to come up with an open alternative to paper publishing, like the one I proposed
here. Well, it's definitely not. It's an scheme in which, instead of charging per subscription, they charge for
publishing!
It charges the researchers ,500, or whatever they can afford to pay, for each study it decides to publish and the research is then available in an open-access database.
I really can't see any improvemente here. In most fields, publishing is free and libraries pay for journal subscription or web access to databases. It's not perfect, but at least the burden of paying is not on the researcher, but on the library system. What will happen if researchers have to pay for publishing? How many papers a year in this system will the researchers be able to afford? How many will researchers in development countries?
And what if they don't get enough quality papers for publishing? Will they auction the remaining slots? If you pay twice as much, will you get more lenient reviewers?
