| While open access seems great, and the reasoning behind it is inline with my ideals, I still have problems with "gold" OA, which seems to be what is being referred to within this article: >Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end. Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far too much for many researchers to pay. It would seemingly largely prevent the publication of independent research within such journals. This was mentioned in the article: >In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals. One big reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality, and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists. However, the article seemingly (and contradictorily) earlier implies that Gold OA is a solution to pushing the cost onto the researchers: >Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish. However, under Gold OA this is only exacerbated, with large fees being everywhere on the publication-end. The readers don't have to pay, but now the authors do. Additionally, this may create another pro-industry publication bias, as industry-funded studies may be more likely to have the money to publish in pay-to-publish journals, and this apparently has now been dubbed "e-publication bias" (bottom of https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf, also see http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544). Lastly, the article mentions predatory publishing, however fails to note that this phenomena is caused by Gold OA in the first place. In fact, it is sometimes specifically called "predatory open-access publishing". The idea behind predatory publishers is that Gold OA incentivizes publication (as they now get paid per-paper), leading them to seek out and accept as many papers as possible regardless of quality. While open science certainly is in-line with my views, I'm not convinced that Gold OA is a good solution here. |
Thus, when OA advocates use the term Gold OA, that gets interpreted the way you do above - whereas they usually intend for the fees to be low or non-existent, for authors. Some have started to use Diamond or Platinum OA for that, but it's hard to get that to stick now.
The point is: there are definitely Open Access models possible where publishing does not entail thousands of dollars of publication costs. This has been proven by many quality journals already.