What I can understand from your email is that you want to say again
that someone has to pay for the open access - be it the author,
publisher or employer / funding agency of the author.
But same is also true in "Traditional Model" or Closed Access. In the
traditional / subscription based model also the Governmental Agency /
Funding Agency pays subscription fee to acquire / subscribe the
journals into their Library for its employee / scholars to "consume"
literature before they can "produce".
Let us remember one thing - in academic domain - both the consumers
and producers are the same - the scientific / academic community. They
consume literature to produce literature. And this circle is ensured
with the help of public money in some way or the other.
Let me introduce two terms for the business models of the Open and the
Closed Access.
"Pre-Paid" for Open Access Publishing - The funding agency Pre-Pays
for the Consume-Produce Circle by spending on the publication of the
research results which it has been funding. This payment has to be
made only once for all members of the scientific community.
"Post-Paid" for Traditional Publishing - The funding agency does not
pay an extra bit for the research funded by it. The authors after
utilising the public money for carrying out research, get the results
published in traditional journals. No payment is required for
publication but the authors surrenders all rights of their paper. The
best papers most often are published in foreign journals. Later on -
the funding agency - makes the journal available in its library after
paying subscription cost. In case of foreign journal it has to shell
out foreign currency to get back the results of even that work which
it originally funded. Multiple payments are required to be made if the
govt. / funding agency has multiple libraries spread over a
geographical area. Even for digital copies / version the licence fee
would be in proportionate to the number of end - users.
It can be easily seen that "Pre-Paid" model makes more sence for
research funding agencies.
So if it costs to publish science - then why not to adopt "Pre-Paid" model?
--Sukhdev Singh, NIC.
http://openmed.nic.in
---------
On 20/05/06, Chandrima Roy
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 14:14:20 +0530 From: Sukhdev Singh < http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum esukhdev at gmail.com
Who bears the cost of the author's intellectual inputs?!!
The same should bear the cost of author's publication.
What is reported in scholarly journals? -- Research output. Who does that research? -- Scientists / Scholars.
And Scientists / Scholars get salary for that. They need infrastructure to work in. They work on Research Projects that cost money .
Who bears all the cost?
Publication costs are just a fraction of the total cost of the research output. So it makes sense to spend a bit extra to expose the research results, gain maximum impact of it and build ground for further research.
So funding agencies ( Govt . or Others) need to spend little extra to publish the research / project outcome which they sponser . Public funding agencies have their publication wings - they just need to allow free / open access to their publications. Atleast to their online versions. Indian Council for Medical Research is an example which provides free access to their journal - Indian Journal of Medical Research.
Well there are other models as followed by BioMed Central and PLoS . Advertising revenues could be other.
Don't we have Free-to-Air TV Channels? Hey! Do we pay for listening to FM Radio Channels? - Private or Public.
I would suggest -
--All publications consuming public money to produce should be publicly accessible - at least their online versions.
--All publicly funded research should be mandated to be open-archived by the author with in a time frame.
--All teaching / reseach institutions should set-up their institutional repositories.
-- Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in http://openmed.nic.in
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 02:18:16 -0700 (PDT) From: ranjit dharmapurikar < http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum d_ranjit at yahoo.com
Dear Sir, You have asked about the cost of open source journals. who will bear the cost. Of course, the publisher, agency , person who is putting the journal on the net is required to bear the cost. Keeping the facility of open source journals is a way of an advertisement. Generally what I have observed that these open source journals are very old. Whenevr they found that there is not demand for such articles then they declear it as an open source journal. At least with this open source journals users will learn and will come to know that such titled journals are available. So it is a way of an advertisement. What I think. Like out dated goods are sold by maximum discount for attracting the customers towards new and fresh product. The same story can be applicable with open source journals R.G. Dharmapurikar
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