Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing

An anonymous reader writes "Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren't happy, saying that it's unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers."

Comments

Re:Best journal charge; weak journals dont

[rsidd]

For example, Annals of Physics (commercial, published by Academic Press) does charge but has a worse reputation than Physical Review (non profit) which charges a lot.

Sorry, I don't think Physical Review (excepting possibly Phys Rev Letters) has a good reputation. Phys Rev B alone, that's just condensed matter, prints 4000 pages a month and most of it is frankly garbage. One may as well just read the preprints on arxiv.org.

Actually, I think the reason the open access movement hasn't caught on in physics is the existence of arxiv.org: in some field, every paper of any importance is now deposited there by the authors so you can bypass the journals, who'll take months to publish it anyway.

A similar preprint culture didn't exist in the biological sciences, so the exorbitant pricing of journals, in this internet age, annoyed people sufficiently that they decided to do something about it.