Information Research Weblog

There's a new book out on open access publising: 'Open access: key strategic, technical and economic aspects', edited by Neil Jacobs and published by Chandos Publishing. However, on a quick scan, before doing a full review, I find that it seems to be concerned entirely with either author-charging by commercial and society publishers, or open archiving. There is no treatment of sponsorship as a business model. Since this is the model that delivers maximum social benefit, the omission is rather surprising, and the omission must be deliberate, since there are a number of open journals around that are published on this basis. As readers will know, one of these was described in Information Research Volume 11 No.3

The omission of sponsored journals is a not-too-subtle bias, which is dangerous, since books of this kind are promoted to lobbyists and politicians, who get the impression that author-charging is the only way to deliver open access when, in fact, such a system is 'closed' at the submission stage - 'open' access should be genuinely open and there are only two ways to deliver that - open archiving and free, sponsored journals.