MIT Press to trial open access journals, so long as someone else pays for it Academic publisher the MIT Press has announced a new initiative to move from subscription-funded journals to open-access papers that are free of charge. The project, dubbed Shift+OPEN, is now accepting applications from English-language journals without geographic restrictions, but it's only funding a single publication for …
That's a decent article, but of course as you say the main conclusion is that it's complicated and varies widely.
My wife has been editor-in-chief for two prominent (in their fields) academic journals. There's a lot of work involved in the editorial process, so even when print costs are excluded or removed (by going online-only, though there too you still have expenses in terms of computing resources, maintenance, etc), there are still significant costs.
Open access is a lovely idea, but someone has to pay for it.
> ...but the Internet was INVENTED to do all of this and do it well using just basic tools.
At last, something that BitTorrent/Blockchain and a number of volunteer distribution nodes would excel at.
The cost per node would be fairly nominal, particularly if there were a lot of nodes.
Would be just like running a BOINC server, except it would consume network bandwidth and some disk instead of CPU/GPU resources. I'd set one up in a heartbeat.
Profit margins for some academic journals are high – see the Nature article linked above – but they're not the entire cost. At best, removing profit looks like it saves up to 40% of the cost for some particularly profit-heavy titles. That still leaves 60% or more that has to be funded somehow.
As usual, lots of people who haven't been involved in the business end of producing an academic journal are sure they know what the problem is, and how to fix it.
Skimming Google responses:
Diamond access is just like Platinum. It is also like Gold, but not quite the same.
Gee, thanks.
Dig some more: Gold, the author pays a few extra dollars - only a couple of thousand, nothing exorbitant (/s) and readers can download for free (OR just email the author, as usual). Platinum - sorry, Diamond - the huge, huge costs of providing the free download URL is borne by donations/public funding to help out the poor downtrodden Elseviers of this world.
Apparently, one of the "extra costs" faced by publishers of open-access journals is in "preservation", i.e. making sure they don't accidentally delete your paper. This is a new burden for the publishers, because they usually dump that onto all the departmental libraries that subscribe to the journal.
So a serious answer answer to your question, we do want to put some effort into spreading around lots of copies of these PDFs (hopefully with a copy of the original LaTeX source) and arranging that all the copies get indexed (even if that is just left to WWW crawlers).[1]
In comparison to Twitter's Single Source of Deletion (aka Elon's finger on the back of the neck of the peon sitting at the keyboard).
[1] and make sure we keep around enough hard-copies of the instructions on how to build PCs capable of displaying PDFs after the apocalypse.
Small payments for individuals are problematic because they're cumbersome. People don't really want to be entering their credit-card details or using PayPal (ugh) or the like just because a paper looks like it might be interesting.
Access through professional organizations and other institutions, with a relatively small fixed payment included in an annual membership fee or the like, is probably more workable. The ACM's Digital Library is a decent model, though the ACM is moving toward Open Access itself. University libraries could automatically enroll all university members (students, faculty, and staff), and public libraries could offer it to members as an add-on.
It wouldn't be sufficient to fund journals completely, by a long shot, but it could contribute to the pool.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
