Publishers are under increasing pressure to make journal papers free to all by abolishing subscriptions and making authors pay a fee instead. In this article, Rüdiger Voss welcomes the benefits that "open access" publishing brings, while John Enderby warns that this new publishing model comes at a price. According to Enderby, researchers have the option to publish elsewhere if they do not like a particular journal. But if all journals were open access, consumers will loose their influence over the market, and funding agencies would have the upper hand to decide how much of their resources would go to publication costs. Rüdiger Voss is a senior researcher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. John Enderby is immediate past president of the Institute of Physics and a paid adviser to its publishing arm.
Category: Articles
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