15.1 Open access journal literature is an open educational resource  (Page 7/16)

With regard to OA journals, there are some detractors.

I will not waste breathe on the PR pitbulls who shriek that OA journals spell the death of peer review; that is simply false. Peter Suber and ARL have thoroughly rebutted this claim.

I am sure there many other dumb arguments against OA journals, but I try to mentally filter out such noise.

Any good arguments against OA journals will focus on the only way in which they are different from toll-access journals: i.e. that their content is made freely available online, that their content uses open licenses, and that (because they give away their content) a subscription-based business model will be very difficult to sustain.

On the first point: There are no good arguments that free online access is undesirable. Some may argue that the benefit is not worth the cost, but no reasoned argument will deny that there are indeed significant benefits. Some question how much demand there is for free online access, but my experience suggests the demand is quite real.

On the second point: Again, some question the necessity of open licensing, but I find there are many reasons why it is desirable.

The biggest question with open licensing, I would think, is allowing derivative works, out of quality control concerns. (There are no valid reasons, in my opinion, to preserve the “integrity” of a journal article, other than quality control concerns.) But, as I address in a post on my blog , there is nothing to fear; at least, what little there is to fear is worth the opportunities it opens.

The other sort of uses that one might want to prevent via copyright, such as commercial use or redistribution, are only concerns insofar as they imperil a particular business model. I will address this further below.

To the final point, that the preceding two necessitate a shift in business models: It’s true. If you can no longer extract rent from access or permission barriers, you’ll need to find a new business model. What are these models? I’ll copy Willinsky here:

Author fee: Author fees support immediate and complete access to open access journals (or, in some cases, to the individual articles for which fees were paid), with institutional and national member-ships available to cover author fees. e.g. BioMed Central

Subsidizied: Subsidy from scholarly society, institution and/or government/foundation enables immediate and complete access to open access journal. e.g. First Monday

Dual-mode : Subscriptions are collected for print edition and used to sustain both print edition and online open access edition. e.g. Journal of Postgraduate Medicine

Cooperative: Member institutions (e.g., libraries, scholarly associations) contribute to support of open access journals and development of publishing resources. e.g. German Academic Publishers

To elaborate a bit on the author fee model, I would break this down into two: full and hybrid. Full author fee journals are fully OA, with no subscription revenue. Hybrid journals charge subscriptions, but also offer individual authors the opportunity to pay to make their own articles OA; the theory is, the author fee offsets the loss in subscription revenue.