A recent article on The Guardian started (yet another) discussion on Open Access Journals. One party asks whether the results of publicly-funded research should only be available for a fee that helps the balance sheet of academic publisher. The other party wonders how do we avoid predatory publishers of Open Access journals charging $500 or more to publish a paper, and playing the “impact factor game“.
I don’t have an answer, I only have another question…All the work I do for academic publishers is voluntary. I review various dozens of articles every year for free, because I can list this activity in my CV. The same happens for editorial boards: academics do it for free. My question is: can’t we do (as academics) the whole publishing process as voluntary? In addition to non-paid reviewers and non-paid associated editors, why don’t we have non-paid associated sysadmins to manage a server?
There are various business models available for open access journals. What would be wrong with the following idea?
- Authors are charged a small fee (say $20 for each accepted paper)
- Assuming 4 issues per year, 10 articles in each issue would generate approx $800/year. This should be more than enough to maintain a couple of virtual machines (mirrored, for backups). I think ISSN numbers are free, but this needs to be investigated.
- Open source software is available to manage submissions and reviews.
- Electronic copies are made available for free, hard copies can be printed on-demand: editors prepare a PDF version of each issue and upload it to like lulu.com or a similar service, and libraries can print it from there if a hard copy is really needed.
- New journals are created by a “group of experts”, similarly to the creation of a new conference / workshop.