Open Access and Academic Journal Quality

摘要

Scholars and librarians have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the market for academic journals. New technologies might be expected to lower journals' production and distribution costs, and for these reduced costs to factor into reduced prices; but library subscription prices remain high (Theodore Bergstrom, 2001) and indeed have continued to rise faster than inflation (McCabe, 2002). This dissatisfaction has led to the proposal of a new business model for academic journals, open access. In contrast to a traditional journal, which generates most of its revenue with subscription fees, an open-access journal makes its articles freely available on the Internet, generating revenue with author fees. As of October 2004, the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) listed over 1,300 open-access journals across academic fields. Perhaps the most famous of these are the biomedical journals published by the Public Library of Science, founded by Nobel-prize-winning biologist Harold Varmus to compete against the top-tier journals in the field. These journals charge substantial author fees, $1,500 per accepted paper.