Suber has a good take on this: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/05/more-misunderstanding-of-oa-journ... * I blame Nature, not the author, for the misleading title on this letter. Gadagkar's argument is not against OA as such, or even OA journals as such, but against fee-based OA journals or "the 'pay to publish and read for free' business model". * Gadagkar is aware that many fee-based OA journals waive their fees in cases of economic hardship (although we should not confuse publication fees at OA journals with "page charges"). He's also aware that many funding agencies allow grantees use grant funds to pay the fees. He finds these two mitigations insufficient and I won't comment on his criticisms. * But he is apparently unaware that most OA journals charge no publication fees at all. To repeat the data from my previous post (coincidentally relevant here): as of late 2007, 67% of the journals listed in the DOAJ charged no publication fees, and 83% of OA journals from society publishers charged no publication fees. He says that "A 'publish for free, read for free' model may one day prove to be viable..." as if it were untried, when in fact it is the majority model around the world. Moreover, it's the exclusive model in his own country. To the best of my knowledge, all OA journals published in India are of the no-fee variety. * Finally, it's important to remember that OA archiving already follows the model of no fees for readers and no fees for authors, and it works equally well for unrefereed preprints and refereed postprints. Just this week, the OA repository at Gadagkar's employer, the Indian Institute of Science, passed the milestone of 10,000 deposits. -- Please read our new blog at: http://blog.prathambooks.org/ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.