engleski

Costs of Open Access

Open Access (OA) to scientific information is a miraculous utensil in the universe of Internet. There are many supporters among researchers and publisher for making OA sustainable in free dissemination of publicly funded scientific information. However, unrestricted online access to the scholarly literature for everyone, costs. This exposé at the beginning recapitulates the steady raising of OA publishing and the rapidly rising practice of article charges or publication fees. Publishing fees are recently introduced with the aim to cover the costs associated with editing, language proofing, type-setting, storing and archiving of the articles as well as managing, material and workmanship expenses. Normally, the scientific community that carries out a big part of scholarly publishing, including research, writing and peer reviewing mostly for free, doesn’t expects that OA publishers should earn extra-profits from article charging. The most commonly ‘author-pay’ model should not become a profitable business nor an obstacles to publication of scientific results at least by offering low-income fee waiver programs. The scope of this exposé is to investigate the possibility of fair distribution of costs and benefits among participants in the whole OA publishing process. The exposé considers the relation among the authors, reviewers, editors, universities, publishers, repository holders, supporting institutions, donors, general public and creators and users of scientific information. The particular attention is devoted to the delicate part of scholarly publishing of decisive importance to quality of OA carried out by peer reviewers that brings into sensitive relation authors and editors and not so much the publishers. The important task is to preserve the enthusiasm to assure high quality of information and dissemination and to satisfy most of the stake-holders of the OA publication process. At the end, the exposé discusses other models than ‘author-pay’ which relay on associations of institutions and companies with common interests in the scientific research fields, that can jointly support, maintain and develop the necessary ITC infrastructure required in the OA publishing process.

Publishing ; open access ; publishing fees

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