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Apparently, as discussed just last month, the predicted pinch for the smaller journals in the wake of the success of PLoS One can already be felt. An editorial ("Why would you pay to get published?"; subscription required) at the European Journal of Neuroscience (EJN) is attacking open access journals, raising the suspicion that submissions may have been dwindeling, or at least are expected to dwindle in the near future. Otherwise, there would be only few rational explanations left for this crude hit-piece which either recycles some rather outdated arguments or distorts by omission.

Let's correct a few things in this editorial - or at least put them in context:
As some OA journals publish several thousand papers a year, and taking into account the relatively low production costs for such journals, these journals must be immensely profitable, generating millions of dollars of revenue.
What the editorial didn't mention is that one of the largest closed-access publishers, Elsevier keeps posting record profits every year from his few thousand 'library pays irrespective of readership' journals. For instance, in 2010, the most recent figure available, they posted a profit of 847 million Euros (that's 1.2 billion US$). In contrast, PLoS, the publisher of the largest open access journal PLoS One, is a non-profit organization and just now breaking even.
the great majority of institutional researchers have access to most scientific journals via their institutional subscription systems.
If that were the case, there would be no "References Wanted" room on FriendFeed and many other such network-based approaches to tackle the "serials crisis".
While there are no data to substantiate this view, there seems a widespread notion that the reviewing process of many OA journals is relatively benign. The famous ‘fake paper’ affair (http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Access-Publisher-Appears/47717) may have fueled such views.
You mean as opposed to the "six fake journals" affair of commercial publishers such as Elsevier?
There is no submission fee and no page charge for publishing in EJN. In other words, expenses for the authors are nil. The proceeds from EJN fund the activities of FENS, including the popular FENS-IBRO schools and the NENS Schools, the FENS job market and travel fellowships and, sponsored also directly by Wiley-Blackwell, the FENS-EJN Awards (http://fens.mdc-berlin.de/awards/). Therefore, publishing in EJN, besides being free, funds FENS.
No, publishing in EJN doesn't fund aynthing, precisely because it is free. Libraries pay at least 4000 Euros per year to subscribe to it. Last time I checked, libraries were funded by the taxpayer just as the researchers. Libraries thus fund FENS. This editorial just told us that every library which subscribes to EJN pays not only for the journal, but even for the FENS activities, even if there are no FENS members at this institution. Shouldn't those who enjoy these FENS activities also be the ones who pay for them? I wonder what the scientists say who never participated in any of these activities (and maybe never have read a single paper from EJN), that their institution sponsors these FENS activities with little to no return on their investment.
Furthermore, together with Wiley-Blackwell we are taking steps to ensure the long-term, stable archiving of the electronic version of your paper. This is an increasingly important (and costly) issue that many OA journals are surprisingly silent about.
And what if some day Wiley-Blackwell goes belly-up because open access becomes so popular that Wiley has to shut down? Where does their archive go then? Down the memory hole? This is precisely why I'm arguing for a library-baseed, open access literature and data archiving system! Libraries have been around for centuries and will be around for as long as there are universities - when nobody will remember the names of any of the currently so profitable publishers any more, who only serve their shareholders and not the scientific community.
In short, publishing in EJN does not draw monies from authors’ tax-payer-funded research, and yet it generates considerable support for your neuroscience community.
So remind me again, please, what was the benefit to the tax-payer that the funds used to line the pockets of Wiley-Blackwell come from libraries and not researchers? And how precisely do the shareholders who get all these taxpayer funds benefit science?

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Posted on Tuesday 05 July 2011 - 18:17:54 comment: 0
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