Chemical Education Today
Letters
Does Information Want To Be Free? Responses to a Recent Editorial on Open Access to JCE’s Published Articles Editor’s Note Last November in an editorial titled, “Does Information Want To Be Free”, I asked whether readers wanted this Journal to provide them with the highest possible quality and pointed
out that “high quality information needs to cost something”. Responses that were sent directly to me appear below.
Open Access Is a Viable Funding Model
out of order and not sustainable. It will take time for a paradigm shift to occur.
I was surprised that John Moore’s November 2008 editorial (1) made no mention of the various funding models for Open Access (OA) journals. One might think that OA journals are published with no income or reimbursement. I don’t think anyone who understands academic publishing believes that journals will be published without any payment. Author fees are the most well-known although not the most common form of OA journal funding model. I don’t think the future will include journals that are published for nothing, but rather a change in the way journal publishers are supported. If libraries did not have to pay subscription costs they could use those funds to pay author fees or host journals on their servers or otherwise support publication, especially by not-for-profit publishers such as scholarly societies. Library-supported institutional repositories may also play a role in hosting journal content, resulting in reduced costs to the publishers. I think most of us can agree that the high profit margins of some of the commercial publishers are
Literature Cited 1. Moore, John W. J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85, 1467. Rosemary Del Toro The author is a life sciences, chemistry, and dentistry librarian at Marquette University Marquette University Raynor Memorial Libraries Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
[email protected] Supporting JCE Online Material http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2009/Sep/abs1029_1.html Full text (HTML and PDF) with links to cited JCE article
© Division of Chemical Education • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 86 No. 9 September 2009 • Journal of Chemical Education
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