Fools' gold?

By Paul Jump. Open-access publishing, once a niche preoccupation, is now a hot-button issue. But concern is growing that unintended consequences of new publication mandates will cost individual scholars and the UK sector dear.
When UK academics in the humanities and social sciences complain of "cataclysms", "delusional fantasies" and "sleepwalking into disaster", you might assume they are talking about the recent removal of public funding for teaching their subjects. But there is another aspect of the government's higher education policy that is causing increasing numbers of non-science scholars to fear the worst.
Twelve months ago, open access was a somewhat arcane cause, particularly outside the sciences. It was championed by a relatively small cadre of committed activists (often those associated with university libraries) outraged by years of above-inflation rises in journal subscription rates and fired by the conviction that research funded by the public should be freely accessible.
The landmark Budapest Open Access Initiative - the manifesto of the open-access movement - was published in 2002, but progress on implementing it had been slow. Some open-access journals, particularly in the life sciences, had built solid reputations, and funders including Research Councils UK had encouraged the depositing of research papers in "green" open-access repositories wherever possible. They had also committed to paying the article fees associated with publishing in some open-access journals (the "gold" method). Read more...