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Ken, what you describe is very common. The incentive structure for academics is to publish in the journals of greatest prestige, which are generally not OA. A prestigious journal can generate a good deal of revenue for its publisher, which the publisher will understandably be concerned about losing. There are certainly other business models that work besides the subscription model, but I won’t argue that the other models are as profitable – at least at this time.
Luckily, open access can be acheived even without OA journals. The vast majority of publishers allow authors to self-archive their articles, in some cases even with a Creative Commons license. If authors choose to publish in prestigious, toll-access journals, they can still make the article available gratis online. Educators, then, can point their students to the free online copy, rather than licensing reprint permissions from the publisher and buying a printed copy.
When I tell people that academic papers (or other content) should be freely available, they almost always counter, “But how will the authors be compensated?” The four alternative business models you mentioned help answer that sort of question. I’ve written about a model similar to the Cooperative model which I call the Educator Donation Model. You can read about it on my blog at (External Link) .
I’ve also written an article on some of the philosophical, economical, and practical reasons that educational materials should be open, which parallels some of the ideas expressed in your article. You can read it at (External Link)
Keep up the good work!
Gavin, you’re spot on with your comments about archiving.
Two excellent resources spring to mind:-
1) BioMed Central’s Summary of funding agency policies on open access:- (External Link)
2) Repository 66 Global Map of Institutional Repositories:- (External Link)
I couldn’t agree more that OA is a related issue to open educational resources. As the OER movement moves closer to drafting a declaration of commonalities, it’s my hope that this will include an expression solidarity with open access.
In the meantime, I wanted to respond to Gavin’s saying that journals will often allow authors to self-archive to add that conference organizers often are also fine with this when it comes to papers that are to be presented and be published in the proceedings. Recently I was deciding whether to submit an abstract and present at a particular conference, my only hesitation being the stated requirement to transfer copyright. I called the organizers and asked whether this were a negotiable point. It turned out that so long as they were able to publish the paper they were not concerned about anything else, and so my wish to dedicate the paper to the public domain wasn’t a problem for them. In other words, it’s worth asking, even if a call for papers doesn’t initially seem friendly on the issue.
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