Comments on Abandoning Print, Not Peer Review

• Economics of Open Access
• Posted by Jeff Frelinger , Kenan Professor at UNC on February 28, 2008 at 8:35am EST

• Hard to believe that $20/year supports an open access journal. Someone else is suppling the costs of hosting (thousand/year at least), maintaining archives etc. Iron mountain charges 20/month to provide backups for 1 desktop, so like many advocates of open access he wants someone else to pay the costs model.

• Embracing the Web (with Peer Review)
• Posted by Robert Hollander , Prof. in European Lit., Emeritus at Princeton Univ. on February 28, 2008 at 9:30am EST

• In 1995 the Dante Society of America (founded at Harvard in 1881 by Longfellow and some friends) asked me to start an online publication to accompany its annual periodical, Dante Studies, which continues its printed life. Four other scholars specializing in Dante's work were asked to join me, and in 1996 we published our first note (contributions are limited to 1500 words). Today we have published just under 60 of such contributions (Googling "ebdsa" takes one who is interested to the site) and citations of these notes are showing up in print journals. Each contribution is published with the advice and consent of the five editors, who all review all submissions. Further, we do so (with rare exceptions) in fewer than seven days; in other words a contributor either learns of our rejection or finds that contribution online within a week. (This is obviously an advertisement for EBDSA for the Dante folk in IHE's readership.)

  As to Professor Frelinger's concerns, the five editors work for nothing (naturally -- we are typical academics), our current Editor, Richard Lansing (Brandeis), is an unusually computer-savvy humanist and has done the site work necessary (no additional cost to anyone there, just Poor Richard's time and mind), and Princeton's Office of Information Technology offers the service of maintaining our website -- a pittance, at most, as we are not a complex operation. When I think of my own dealings with print journals, in which years have gone by between the birth of an idea in printable form and its actual publication, I am pleased to be associated with the EBDSA and think we are performing a service to our field.

• online journals
• Posted by John M. Hill , Professor at U.S. Naval Academy on February 28, 2008 at 9:55am EST

• Hollander's contribution is exactly right. An institution hosts the journal for a mere pittance. Issues and articles appear relatively quickly, compared to print journals where the backup can be as long as a year or more. Peer review is as professional as it would be for a good print journal -- at least there is no reason why not unless scholars refuse to participate for some odd reason. Heroic Age, where I am on the editorial board, has been publishing online now for several years, evolving into a major journal for early medieval studies focused on Northern Europe. However, I have heard colleagues wonder whether online publishing is as respectable as hard copy publishing, a question time will overcome if peer review standards remain as professional for the one as for the other.

• more on the economics of open-access journals
• Posted by ceball , online journal editor on February 28, 2008 at 10:00am EST

• Editors of open-access, online journals aren't asking, as Dr. Frelinger suggested, for others to assume the costs of running a journal. That's an argument more aligned with open-source movements, which is different than open-access, but still a wrong assumption in my opinion.

  But what he cautioned regarding overlooking the costs is true about the article here. It's unfortunate that costs weren't explored in more depth here, but that's not an unusual item to be left out when it comes to this discussion.

  One of the myths of open-access, online journals is that they are cheaper to publish because the expense of print and postage goes away. But, as said earlier, those costs are replaced with server purchases, networking infrastructure, software purchases, hosting costs, and -- let us not forget the people -- the IT staff who usually must assist the editors with technical issues. (Even the journal I co-edit, where we have an editor who used to be a systems administrator and so knows the ins and outs of servers, works with the school's IT staff where the server is located.)

  Then, other costs never change between print journals and online, open-access journals: namely course releases, office computers, graduate assistants, professional development for the changes in online editing/production procedures that editors need to learn, and the like.

  I may be wrong, but I think that a more accurate comparison between the economics of print journals and open-access, online journals could come in the form of cost to publish per subscription/unique reader. (Unique readers are like unique IP address visits to a website, so they can be counted as individual 'readers'.)

  As this article mentioned, open-access usually means significantly more readers than print journal subscription bases. (For an example of these comparisons in one set of journals, see the scholarly webtext, The Arrow and the Loom, published by Douglas Eyman at Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy... http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.1/
  binder.html?topoi/eyman/index.html).

  Although it's difficult (if not impossible) to track subscription-based, print journals that are read online through library/membership systems, it's easy to recognize, as Eyman's article does, that print, subscription-based journals have much *much* smaller readerships who actually pay out of pocket to read (through their subscriptions) than open-access journals.

  Good for Indiana and this new museum journal for joining the ranks of the open-access.

  Cheryl.

• A "new" model? A "free" journal?
• Posted by Sandy Thatcher , Director, Penn State Press on February 28, 2008 at 10:50am EST

• One is always happy to see universities stepping up to the plate to subsidize scholarly publishing activities (although I understand at Indiana the press does not get any subsidy but is expected to make do on its own, even though it too publishes journals). This is hardly a "new" model, however. The Philosophers' Imprint, for example, has been published as a fully peer-reviewed open access journal at the University of Michigan since 2001 through the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, edited by two distinguished philosophers, Stephen Darwall and J. David Velleman, with an equally distinguished editorial advisory board: http://www.philosophersimprint.org/about.html. It seems perfectly fitting for the library at Michigan to be undertaking this venture since the press there has no journals program. On the other hand, the library and press there are appropriately cooperating on publishing a book series, Digital Culture Books, online: http://www.digitalculture.org/about.html.

  Others here have commented about the hidden costs of running an online journal. Libraries are not used to toting up costs in the way that publishers are because they do not have to balance their books with costs versus revenues in the same rigorous business manner, and it is therefore probably easy to overlook many expenses that are not being fairly attributed to the cost of publishing this journal. These days most of the larger publishers have very sophisticated editorial management systems to help editors with the processing of manuscript submissions and peer review; such platforms are being developed as open source tools--at Penn State, among other places--but they do not yet come close to the sophistication of these commercially available platforms. I would guess that the library at Indiana is not supplying such a service to the editor of this journal. If it did, that would be a significant cost.

  As for the actual use of the journal, the comparison of a subscriber base of several hundred libraries and 20,000 people who have visited the web site is surely misleading: each of the subscriber libraries serves large constituencies of its own, probably many multiples of 20,000, and when this journal was part of a large publishing database of journals, like Project Muse or Wiley-Blackwell, users would have been much more likely to locate articles of interest than they would trying with just Google searching, where the entry for the journal article might be well down in the ranking far past the point at which most people would be willing to scroll through the Google pages.

  Open access surely has its place in our modern repertoire of scholarly communication models, but let's not judge it on the basis of ignoring real costs and making misleading comparisons.

• Posted by Mitch Allen , Publisher at Left Coast Press, Inc. on February 28, 2008 at 12:35pm EST

• It's good to see these experiments taking place. But, in addition to the economic issues mentioned by others, open access has its limitations for those trolling for authoritative information. While serious scholars can identify a solid refereed journal--and this one is--I wonder how discerning students or members of the larger public that this journal is now reaching will be. What happens to this model when the hypothetical Creation Science Review or International Journal of Astrological Studies go on line with an editor, peer review system, and editorial board? Right now, university serials librarians provide the filter that separates serious research publications from frivolous ones by their choices on what they subscribe to. Where is that filter in this system?

• Posted by Moira Smith , Associate Librarian at Indiana University on February 28, 2008 at 1:00pm EST

• There is no doubt that Professor Jackson's costs were vanishingly small only because Indiana University was paying indirectly for the time and infrastructutre that makes Museum Anthropology review possible. The difference is that the university is no longer outsourcing the final stages of publication to a publisher. When publishers are for-profit enterprises like Wiley and Elsevier who are beholden to shareholders, the prices charged go well beyond actual costs. (University presses do much better with their prices, but increasingly they too are being asked to make a profit.) This venture at IU is exciting because it means that scholars and libraries are taking back control of the distribution of their work from entitites ho are driven primarily by the profit motive.

  As an aside,when it comes to the major (and expensive) trade publishers, the claim that the traditional model guarantees quality is increasingly hollow. I am seeing more and more evidence of works that were published with little or no signs of editing, copyediting, or proofreading. I have heard from several authors with major trade publishers who have had to pay for their own copyediting--and this for titles that retail for over $100 apiece. The drive to return big profits is forcing publshers to cut or pass on costs wherever they can.

• IU v. Purdue
• Posted by Thomas Bacher , Director at Purdue University Press on February 28, 2008 at 1:00pm EST

• As a resident Boilermaker, I can't help but remind the IU library that open access is not new in the great State of Indiana. In fact, if you look here (a cooperative site of the Purdue University Libraries and the Purdue University Press), http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/thepress/, you'll see a few examples of open access and one(CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture -- ISSN 1481-4374) that is now in its ninth year. So my questions is "Where's the Beef?"

• Funding Open Access Peer Review Electronic Journals
• Posted by Jim , Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill on February 28, 2008 at 1:25pm EST

• I have served as founding editor of three peer-reviewed journals. The first, On the Horizon, started out as a print journal in 1992 and became available in electronic form in 1996. This journal is now published by a commercial publisher in the UK and is funded by subscriptions. The second journal, The Technology Source (http://technologysource.org), founded in 1997, was a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal initially funded by corporate sponsors; when the dot-com recession hit, it was taken over by Michigan Virtual University where it was published (and fully funded by MVU) until 2005. Fortunately, in the nick of time, we were able to archive the past issues on the ibiblio server at UNC-Chapel Hill.
  The third journal, Innovate (http://innovateonline.info), founded in 2004, is published and was initially funded entirely by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. This funding model was modified at the beginning of the current volume year by the introduction of a From our Sponsors feature, which allows sponsors to publish white papers or case studies describing how their products and services enhance educational effectiveness or how they view the future of education and the role that educational technology will play in that future. The objective is to have sponsors support publication while publishing material within the scope of our mission and, at the same time, clearly differentiating sponsored articles from those received through more typical channels. Microsoft is our charter sponsor, and we hope to add more sponsors before the end of the year.

  From my experience, publishing an open–access, peer-reviewed journal requires almost as much funding support as publishing a print journal. There is no free lunch. Innovate’s funding model is not feasible for most academic journals. And, at this date, we need several more sponsors to fully cover costs. Other funding models for open-access e-journals require authors to share publication costs. This model may shut out some authors, and it may carry the negative connotations of vanity publishing, even when peer review is part of the process. Fortunately, many institutions help meet the first challenge by setting aside funds to support faculty publication in these journals. The second problem will only be overcome by time and a concerted campaign of education to make faculty members and administrators aware of the merits of these journals. The library-supported funding model illustrated by Museum Anthropology Review serves as an exemplar that, hopefully, will be adopted by a large number of institutions.

  There is no reason that open-access, peer-reviewed e-journals cannot be as valuable to the academic community as traditional print journals. These journals are not only accessible to anyone in the world with Internet access, they offer features that print journals cannot (e.g., links to references available on the Web, author webcasts and podcasts, the ability to forward articles to colleagues via email, links to related articles). It is only a matter of time before the community as a whole recognizes and accepts the opportunity that such journals offer to assist us in one of our major missions: dissemination of knowledge to the society that supports us.

• Who Bears the Cost?
• Posted by Jim Reische on February 28, 2008 at 1:25pm EST

• The comments so far have been interesting, as always, but they rather miss the central point. The question is not which costs more, print or digital. As in the very lively debate over the environmental impact of ethanol production, any estimation of the cost of digital publication depends entirely on which factors you feed into your calculation.

  The real, core issue is who should bear these costs. Commercial publishers? Academic presses? Libraries? Universities? Or, as in some of the hard sciences, the authors themselves? There is no single right answer, but there are better and worse solutions. For hard-copy scholarly journals, the costs of peer review, copyediting, design, and dissemination were (and still are) most often borne up front by the publisher, who then reallocated them to individual universities through subscription charges and a variety of secondary channels (permissions fees, etc.). We all quite reasonably balk at being asked to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars a year for a subscription to a single journal, but no matter what the price we can all agree that the subscription is generally cheaper than the cost of publishing the same journal oneself. Concerns have arisen about whether these costs are being allocated fairly in practice, and about whether publishers are extracting too much profit, but the fundamental principle of cost distribution embodied in the subscription model made sense for many years, as long as it was justly applied.

  Whereas for the new generation of journals coming out of libraries or press-library collaborations the costs, whatever they are, are borne directly by the host university. Indiana is paying for the Museum Anthropology Review even though it’s far from the only institution that reaps the benefits of its publication. We can hope that those costs are lowered by online distribution, but that’s not really the issue. The real question is whether Indiana should have to front the costs of producing a journal that also benefits Michigan and Amherst and Texas Christian and hundreds of other institutional users, large or small, public or private, rich or poor. And if not, then where should the relief come from?

  (Incidentally, this is the same question that has plagued university presses for so long: should University X bear the costs of having its press review, edit, design, print and publish books that are not always written by its own faculty, and whose publication benefits readers far beyond the reaches of its own campus?)

  To oversimplify a bit, we have three basic solutions available to us: either the publishing institution pays, or the benefiting institutions pay, or society as a whole pays through a government subsidy for scholarly dissemination (which arguably benefits society in turn). We can debate the merits of each of these ideas, but until we’ve made a well-reasoned choice about how to distribute the costs we shouldn’t go jumping into a discussion about the relative economies of print vs. digital.

• Cranks are already OA
• Posted by Ben Brumfield on February 28, 2008 at 1:50pm EST

• Mitch Allen wonders "how discerning students or members of the larger public that this journal is now reaching will be", and what happens when the crackpots begin publishing online.

  It's incorrect to assume that the larger public discerns serious scholarship from junk scholarship by the filtering role research libraries play. The proportion of the general public researching a subject who are willing to take time off work, drive to a research library, wrestle with parking, etc is minuscule compared with the proportion who do a simple search on the net. The competition between real scholarship and nonsense in popular opinion doesn't occur within library walls.

  As we know, the pyramidiots are already well-represented online -- it's the serious scholarship that's inaccessible to the larger public. I find it difficult to understand how allowing casual researchers to read peer-reviewed scholarship as easily as they already read nonsense can possibly be bad for the public.

• Reply to Mitch Allen
• Posted by Bill Melater on February 28, 2008 at 2:30pm EST

• Mitch Allen says, "It’s good to see these experiments taking place. But, in addition to the economic issues mentioned by others, open access has its limitations for those trolling for authoritative information. While serious scholars can identify a solid refereed journal—and this one is—I wonder how discerning students or members of the larger public that this journal is now reaching will be. What happens to this model when the hypothetical Creation Science Review or International Journal of Astrological Studies go on line with an editor, peer review system, and editorial board? Right now, university serials librarians provide the filter that separates serious research publications from frivolous ones by their choices on what they subscribe to. Where is that filter in this system?" (end quote)

  Good points, but too late. I just Googled "creation science." The first four sites on the list, and most of the next ten sites on the list, argue for young-earth creationism and against evolution (and geology, some of them). Anyone can create an online "journal" on any subject, claim to use peer review (or indeed use it, defining "peer" however he or she wants), and list the members and qualifications (real or made-up) of an editorial board. The cost of creating such a journal--writing, editing, layout, conversion to pdf files--can be practically zero. The cost of hosting or disseminating it can be very low.

  So the perpetrators of slipshod thinking and arrant nonsense can already reach millions of people, and some of them do. "[S]tudents or members of the larger public" already see no end of seemingly authoritative drivel every day, and lots of them trust it.

  In the online world, the score right now is Folly & Lies, millions of points; Good Evidence & Sound Logic, a few points. That's true in nearly every subject. Anyone who wants to bypass gatekeepers of knowledge and arbiters of authority need only click a mouse. The filters still exist only among people who deliberately ask for filters.

  Online editions of good, credible, truly authoritative scholarly journals might make the score a little closer. Having more such journals available would give us another teaching opportunity. We could compare and contrast the good and the bad to show students how to figure out that a slick-looking, apparently credible online publication is actually nonsense. They'll need that skill, because they're going to live and work in a world that lacks filters and gatekeepers.

• Keeping stuff straight
• Posted by G. Rendell on February 28, 2008 at 2:30pm EST

• The issue of online vs. print journals has a number of implications in terms of sustainability -- some of them pretty obvious, several far less so. I intend to post to "Getting to Green" on that subject, hopefully this evening.

  In terms of this conversation, however:

  It's not reasonable to burden any digital journal with the full cost of a new server, a system administrator, etc., unless you're willing to burden the competing print journal with the full cost of a printing press, bindery equipment, etc. In each case, the "first unit" cost is prohibitive, but the marginal cost of production at realistic volumes is far less. In the case of digital publications, the marginal cost, starting at unit two, is essentially zero.

  That being the case, digital distribution will always be less expensive than print distribution. All costs related to actually producing information are the same. But, the costs of materials, physical processes, shipping and storage always far exceed the costs of posting to a web server. While Jim Reische is correct in saying that who bears these costs is an important issue, it's less important -- and needn't take priority -- when costs are low. And, for digital journals which are not open access (which charge a subscription fee, for example), the traditional cost burden model can readily be maintained.

  Equally important is the fact that the externalized costs of digital publication are both small and relatively narrowly imposed (typically, to the hosting institution). The externalized costs of print publication (air pollution, water pollution, forest depletion, fresh water depletion, greenhouse gas emission, etc.) are both large and very widely imposed. (Oops, getting close to a sustainability issue, there. Sorry.)

  As regards the authoritative nature of the journal, it's already been noted that there are numerous mediocre-at-best journals in print. Digital is no different. As journals proliferate, we need some sort of certification or accreditation process. The fact that some journals are open access (cost free) needn't take university librarians out of that role. My university library already provides online access to some journals which I could find, at no additional cost, on my own. The fact that the U chooses to provide them does, however, give an explicit stamp of approval.

  And remember, digitally distributed journals (including open access journals) are in their infancy. Most are still just PDF images of printed pages. The leverage provided by even such simple technology as hyperlinks has not been incorporated, in most cases. The long-term question on digital journals is not whether they threaten the profitability of Wiley or Elsevier, or whether they can help university presses reshape their cost structures. The long-term question is whether they have the potential -- by making more information available to a wider audience in a more flexible, powerful and efficient format -- to help obviate the ever-increasing number of information silos which is academic journal publishing (and, indeed, much of academe in general).

• put it online and they will come
• Posted by Pam Wilson on February 28, 2008 at 3:10pm EST

• University Press Journal programs provide a multitude of services to editors and reader/subscribers (both institutional and individual). These services include the typical production and distribution methods for the electronic and print formats but also added services: metadata creation for submission to indexing and abstracting services, archiving arrangements, CrossRef (DOI)participation, citation linking, etc.
  Another service that many editors find important is continued promotion and marketing of the journal. This piece of the publishing process is often left out of the open access cost comparisons. Having materials available at pertinent exhibits, conferences and meetings is important, not only to increase the number of readers, but to raise awareness about the publication to prospective article authors, peer-reviewers, book reviewers, and future editorial board members.
  Why does University administration support journal publishing only at their Library and not at their University Press?
  If this same journal had gone to Indiana University Press would the University have supported the online publication of this journal? I doubt it.

• Abandoning Print, Not Peer Review
• Posted by Patricia Galloway , Associate Professor at University of Texas at Austin on February 28, 2008 at 4:10pm EST

• A number of comments in response to the original article speak to all the usual protests against online peer-reviewed journals, the most frequent being that it can’t cost as little as indicated. Of course it is necessary to have an existing information technology infrastructure for the cost to be negligible, but what many miss is the fact that with the infrastructure in place, journals that publish text, as most do, represent really tiny storage requirements and concomitant backup concerns, while the support programs themselves are not complex (especially because their goals do not include gating the content) and do indeed cost very little for an existing IT installation to run and maintain (here at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, we are in fact running the same Open Journal System that supports MAR, which we use to support the peer-review and content-preparation steps for what for the time being becomes a paper publication, at similar low cost). It should also be noted that some of the costs of print publication were tied up in creating surrogate resource discovery data that is simply not worth bothering with when the full text is available to Internet search engines whose abilities are being sharpened every day by increasing sensitivity to such features as source document genre.

  In the long run, the serious costs are those that nobody has yet mentioned, which are the costs of archiving digital journals and maintaining them available over time. And this is where the excellent fit between academic journals and research libraries and archives, which have made it their business to preserve the products of past research for the future, comes into its own. As an archivist I see this task sitting squarely in the middle of the research library’s mission, and I for one am gratified to see such libraries take advantage of the affordances and broad reach of the Internet to broaden their mission accordingly to embrace the world (and indeed even locations in the United States where a research library is physically out of reach). Furthermore, university libraries are beginning to participate in federations of digital repositories that can share the burden of the archiving task by replicating each others’ productions.

  When MIT first proposed to open up its scholarly products freely to the world, people were not sure what to make of such a move, but that was just the beginning. Professor Jackson and I have another colleague, physical anthropologist Leslie Chan, who makes it his business to “parachute in” DSpace digital repositories—the open-source archiving software that was originally concocted to support MIT’s venture—to east Asian countries where small research groups are increasingly able to offer their work to the world in digital monograph series as soon as an Internet feed is available. This sea change is of course threatening to established accreditation regimes and makes those dependent upon them queasy sometimes, especially when we consider the changes that are bound to come when everyone has the same access to knowledge. But for most of us, who are simply trying to get on with scholarly work, it is a great boon to be able to share ideas and get feedback in a fraction of the time and with less than a fraction of the cost that was required before.

  Patricia Galloway
  Associate Professor in the School of Information, University of Texas at Austin

• Posted by Dan on February 28, 2008 at 4:30pm EST

• I'm not understanding what is so unique about the Museum Journal in Indiana (my Alma Mater). The "Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies," is now in its 3rd issue online. It's freely available. It's as peer reviewed as the next. It looks great. It is great. Have a look.

  http://www.thdl.org/collections/journal/jiats/index.php?s=03

  Or in Tinyurl:

  http://tinyurl.com/2rvmmv

  Cheers,
  Dan

• Ethics?
• Posted by Darrell , Graduate Student at Penn State on February 28, 2008 at 6:00pm EST

• What I find sadly missing in the discussion of costs is the ethics of closed access publishing. Is it ethical to limit access to knowledge to those with the financial resources to purchase it? Having done my undergrad at a good sized, but far from rich state school, I can tell you how frustrating it is to consistently want to read journals I could not access, or were embargoed for six months to a year. I would sometimes resort to e-mailing friends at other Universities and asking them grab an article for me. Closed access research does not further the primary mission of the University: education.

  The problem is compounded if you are coming from a poor country and looking for current research. Is it ethical to exclude those billions of people just because they weren't born into a wealthy country?

  Finally, a great deal of research is funded by public money, so it seems rather unethical to not only deny the public access to results of that research, but to then give it away to a private company to sell back at a profit to other researchers (also mostly publicly funded). Thank goodness the NSF and NIH are (much too) slowly coming to their senses on this front.

• Libraries matter
• Posted by Librarian on February 28, 2008 at 6:55pm EST

• As Prof. Frelinger pointed out, $20/year is not the real cost of running an open access journal. The article does point out that the journal was created by infrastructure established by the Indiana University Libraries, and quotes Patricia Steele, the dean of libraries at Indiana University about her libraries' role, but none of the wise and weighty opinions yet proffered in the comments seem to understand or acknowledge the work of the libraries in making this venture even possible.

  I'd especially like to correct Professors Hollander and Hill for acting as though (in Professor Hill's words) "An institution hosts the journal for a mere pittance". Sirs, you obviously have no clue how much effort and intelligence librarians exert to support your work. To dismiss our work as a "mere pittance" is to dismiss our profession, education and efforts. I'd be tempted to brush this off as a typical faculty sexist denigration of their "pink-collar" library colleagues, but I must remind myself that one need not be a sexist in order to offhandedly insult libraries or librarians. However I do want to say that, whatever the source, the routine ignorance and denigration of librarians is unacceptable -- particularly in academia.

• Publishing costs
• Posted by Editor , Professor at University of Massachusetts on March 31, 2010 at 4:45am EDT

• First of all, I have to say that I'm baffled by this essay, as there is absolutely nothing special about MAR. Online-only peer-reviewed journals, OA or not, have been with us for at least 20 years (one of the earliest being Psycoloquy) and by now there are hundreds or even thousands of such journals.

  More importantly though, I have some remarks concerning the above discussion about publishing costs. It should be realized that currently almost all journals are moving towards an online-only publication. Already now, printing and mailing is only a minor part of the cost of publishing a journal. One part of the costs that has not received much attention is the production of the PDF. Some open-access journals just convert the author-provided manuscript, but the better OA and non-OA publishers do much more. I edit a journal for Wiley-Blackwell and they provide copy-editing services (correcting minor grammatical and spelling errors), formatting manuscripts to a uniform style, checking and correcting figure quality (very important for a biomedical journal), checking whether references are actually correct, and so on. This is an extremely important service (and one reason I myself never use online repositories like PubMed Central that just store untreated manuscripts) and can only provided by highly-trained professionals, hence costly.

  However, whatever services a journal offers to its authors, editors, and readers, the only real difference (financially-speaking) between OA and subscription journals is not the ultimate cost to produce and article, it is who pays that cost. In the classical model it is the reader who pays, in the OA model it generally is the author. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Several people have already commented above on the advantages of OA, so I'll concentrate here a bit on the other side of the coin. How about the role of industry, for example? In the biomedical field, industry is a much larger consumer of academic literature than it produces. The implication for this is that under the classical model they pay a larger share of publication costs than academia. And then the authors: under the classical model, if I have data that are worthwhile, I can write them up and submit them anytime I want and get them published (if they're good enough). With OA, I can only get them published if I happen to have funds for this available. Some journals offer waivers of publication fees if authors can show that they cannot pay, but that just means that other labs will have to pay more out of their grants.

  Without the Internet, this whole discussion would, of course, not take place. Universal availability of the Web makes wider access possible and OA most probably is the trend of the future. However, we can only make this fundamental change in the academic publishing system if we are clearly aware of all aspects of the question.