Harvard: Journals Too Expensive, Switch To Open Access

New submitter microcars writes "Harvard recently sent a memo to faculty saying, 'We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called "providers") to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.' The memo goes on to describe the situation in more detail and suggests options to faculty and students for the future that includes submitting articles to open-access journals. If Harvard paves the way with this, how long until other academic bodies follow suit and cut off companies such as Elsevier?"

Comments

Peer Review

[sycodon]

Isn't one of the primary functions of a journal to facilitate the peer review process?

I seem to remember it goes something like this: Paper is submitted, editors evaluate, if it's not complete garbage, they send it to other scientists in that field, they provide feedback, decision to publish is made.

The Climategate emails showed a concerted effort to gain control of this process or at least influence the editors to not proceed with the review process in some instances. Will open source journals be more or less susceptible to that?