Publishing in free access journal v paid journal?

[mikeph]

Just read this article which went on-line a couple of hours ago and was interested in some opinions here from the research community.

One of the world's largest funders of science is to throw its weight behind a growing campaign to break the stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared online.

Nearly 9,000 researchers have already signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing as part of a campaign dubbed the "academic spring" by supporters due to its potential for revolutionising the spread of knowledge.

But the intervention of the Wellcome Trust, the largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is likely to galvanise the movement by forcing academics it funds to publish in open online journals.

Sir Mark Walport, the director of Wellcome Trust, said that his organisation is in the final stages of launching a high calibre scientific journal called eLife that would compete directly with top-tier publications such as Nature and Science, seen by scientists as the premier locations for publishing. Unlike traditional journals, however, which cost British universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year to access, articles in eLife will be free to view on the web as soon as they are published.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/wellcome-trust-academic-spring

I noticed a couple of particularly well put comments:

This is excellent news. In the past, academics (like me) signed away copyright to journal publishers, who told them it had administrative advantages and who paid nothing for the rights. No one imagined the Internet thirty or forty years ago. Now all that old work, most of it publicly funded, has been re-cycled but hidden behind pay walls. The authors have never had to be consulted - they had signed away their rights at the outset. ALL this old work should be on open access, free to download

I don't see how the publishers can claim the cost of peer review and the editorial boards of journals as an expense. The editorial boards and reviewers are volunteers who give their time for free. I'm a computer scientist and regularly publish in Elsevier and Springer journals - I also review for them for free. It's crazy, we do the research, write the papers, our peers review them and then we sign away our copyright and the publishers charge our institutions to buy the journals!
I was recently offered to pay $500 to make a paper "open access" - they've got to be kidding.

Time for a change?

 

[Ryan_m_b]

I'd love it if more articles were free, aside from freeing subscription funds for researchers it would allow members of the public to access scientific articles. I don't see however how it is going to work, where is the money going to come from to run the publishing services? I'd hate to see random adverts spammed into my reading of a scientific article.

 

[turbo]

It's hard to see how the business model will work, as Ryan says. Several times a month, I get spammed by "on-line" "open-access" journals wanting submissions. Once you start digging, you'll find that those "journals" want per-page fees from researchers. That can get expensive for researchers who don't have current active status with academic groups. No grant money and no departmental support means publishing can be expensive under such circumstances.

If you publish in a Springer journal, you will likely pay nothing out-of-pocket. Once your paper is refereed and revised to the satisfaction of the editor, the editor may recommend that you self-publish on ArXiv even before they publish it in their subscription-only on-line and print journals. Note: The self-publish request may have been because our little group had to maintain a presence on-line to host the spreadsheets and archive of images to keep the paper from getting unwieldy - still it was a nice surprise.