[Reader-list] open access in academia: from user pays to author pays?

[lalitha kamath]

I thought this might be an article of interest to the group- it has stimulated a longer conversation and people can follow the thread on the link to read more. 

H-ASIA
March 22, 2010

Further thoughts on Open Access
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Ed. note: This issue was raised in a new item reported by Profesor 
Kirkpatrick on March 20.  The issued raised by Paul Kratoska merit 
careful
consideration; I would also wonder whether all universities who embrace 
the open access policy will be as willing to advance support for "mere"
articles in the humanities?  The whole higher education model appears to be undergoing a translation into a scientific-industrial one.    FFC
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From: Paul H. Kratoska <kratoska at nus.edu.sg>

Open Access is an important response to the high prices charges by
commercial academic presses, particularly for science, technology and
medicine journals. However, academics need to understand that open
access is a shift from a user pays system to an author pays arrangement.

Fees currently charged to authors to have articles included in open
access journals are listed below. (This information comes from the
University of California at Berkeley; see
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html for the
complete list.)

Before embracing open access, scholars need to consider whether they 
would be willing, or able, to pay a fee of $3,000 to get an article 
published.

Major universities in the US are gearing up to pay these fees on behalf
of their staff (e.g., the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity
created by Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley
http://www.oacompact.org/ ). But how many scholars in the developing
world are going to be able to come up with these sums? If scholars
around the world are able to read work from North America free of charge
but unable to contribute to the discussion, it doesn't seem like a very
good outcome.

Fees charged by Publishers of Open Access materials
*       BioMed Central: US$625-$2,365 (Standard = $1,535)
*       Public Library of Science: US$1,250-$2750
*       Elsevier: $3,000
*       Cambridge $1,700
*       Oxford Journals: $2,250
*       Taylor & Francis $3,100
*       Wiley InterScience $3,000
*       World Scientific $2,500

Paul

Dr Paul H. KRATOSKA :: Managing Director, NUS Press (Pte) Ltd (A
Business Unit of NUS Enterprise) :: National University of Singapore ::
AS3-01-02, 3 Arts Link, Singapore 117569 Tel +65 6516-5474 :: Fax +65
6774-0652
For NUS Press titles please see http://www.nus.edu.sg/sup/

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