Open Access: Reality or Delusion?

The open access (OA) initiative rocks! There is nothing that could advance research and science more than providing unrestricted access to peer-reviewed work at no charge. At a personal level, I have been so excited about this movement which is all about free exchange of scientific results.

Until now.

This morning, I was following up with a publisher regarding a journal article I will have published soon. And I was intrigued to see on one of the forms that the publisher is giving me the invaluable opportunity of making my work publicly accessible. To everyone. At no fee. To be precise, at no fee to the reader, simply because I, as an author, will have to pay the bill on behalf of virtually every reader. $3000 is how much I was asked to pay in order to sponsor my open access article!

I admit I was too naive to think that the open access initiative would incur no cost on me as a reader nor as an author. At the end of the day, someone has to pay the bill. But it came to me as a surprise that the open access model simply transfers the cost from the collective audience to a single entity. That is, instead of charging individual readers $10-$20 for access to my article (which is the case in non-open-access journals), I as an author will have to pay a wholesome of $3000! And that is even before anyone has actually showed interest in reading my article. When you think about it, this model is even more profitable to publishers than restricted-access models which for a long time have been described as "greedy". In restricted-access models, publishers take a risk in assuming most of the cost of publishing an article in hope that enough readers will subscribe at a cost to get access to the article. In the supposedly more beneficial open access model, the publisher guarantees a revenue of at least $3000 per article even if the article goes unnoticed.

I still believe that the open access initiative is promising in principle. But we can't be blind to the fact that so far it has been poorly implemented. The reality is that for such a movement to succeed, authors, readers and most importantly publishers all have to chip in. They all have to compromise. We cannot simply shift the financial burden to a single entity and wait for free and open exchange of information to magically happen! This is a delusion.