Who pays for Open Access?
HASTAC’s Cathy Dadvison has an interesting post up on the economic issues associated with open access. From the piece:
In any case, publishers have to have some motivation, some guarantee not that they will make money (very few scholarly publishers make money) but that they won’t lose it. The for-profit publishers (and there are many scholarly publishers such as Wiley that do a healthy, for-profit business) will need some form of compensation. The scholarly non-profit publishers (largely but not exclusively university presses) will need some method for offsetting any revenue lost from open access. Unless that bottom-line is figured into the equation, there is no motivation for someone to be a publisher. Without publishers, then authors have to be in the business of self-publishing. That’s fine . . . but, as I’ve written about many times in this blog, self-publishing isn’t free. And it isn’t easy. And, most definitely, it isn’t “professional.” Finally, authors should be in the business of writing (which is hard enough); we should not also have to be publishing our own writing and doing all that is required to have it published in a polished, formal way (i.e. not in the casual and spontaneous format of a blog but as refereed, responsible online scholarship).
I absolutely agree with Cathy’s observation that open access doesn’t mean zero cost. The costs of publishing are significant and that is not something that magically goes away with open access.
That being said, I can’t help but wonder whether our perception of self-publishing as non-professional will persist. Arguably, the more polished a publication is the more it is geared towards posterity. It’s very much like paper publishing: what is released is a ‘finished’ product that is no longer updated. Of course I am not implying that peer-review, citing of sources and other cornerstones of academic discourse are not important. But what makes these things - in principle - impossible to have in blogs, in conjunction with pieces which are not modeled after print texts? Citing and linking are highly transparent processes in blogs (or in any other hypertext). And surely systems of peer review could be put into place as well (probably a form of open peer review). Perhaps we’ll find some answers to these questions in November.
