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Open Access To Scientific Literature: Can It Work?
evilquaker writes "Nature is running a free web focus on the issue of open access to scientific literature. The current model of scientific publishing dates back to the seventeenth century and -- like the music industry -- is in serious danger of becoming irrelevant because of the rise of the internet. The main issue up for discussion is whether the author-pays/access-is-free model will supplant the author-pays-less/readers-pay-too model. "
The Public Library of Science publishes the rather open, and rather lovely PLoS Biology Journal completely openly online.
I think that PLoS might very well be the model for how things are done in the future, now that the internet has essentially reduced the distribution costs to zero.
Peer review is as good as any traditional journal. In theory at least; my field is physics so I haven't actually read any articles in the PLoS journals.
With the author pays model, the articles can be distributed around the world, without restrictions. This is a big thing, for poor countries as well as people who have graduated but still wan't to keep up with their field. And we don't see the perversity were researchers need to assign the copyright to the journal and then pay to read their own words!
As PLoS is a non-profit, the per-page costs are not that big as there is no need to fatten the wallets of any shareholders. Hell, per-page costs for PLoS are lower than for many traditional for-profit journals! Additionally, researchers from poor countries are allowed to publish for free. This combined with the fact that they can get the articles for free, is about the best we can do to help the third world to increase their knowledge base.
I wish all the success to PLoS and hope that the same concept will be increasingly popular in other scientific fields as well.