From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 15:18:23 +0100

A new Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access has
been published. This one is with Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director for
the non-profit OA publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS).

*Some excerpts from Cameron Neylon’s answers*:

“I think the biggest achievement [of the OA movement since 2001] is
actual adoption: the scale and growth of accessible research content
today is both large and growing far faster than any other segment of
research publishing.

“By some estimates we already have public access to half of new
literature in the biomedical sciences. This is a huge achievement,
even though everyone at PLOS and in the wider OA movement would wish
it to move faster.

“Successful repositories are burgeoning, pure Open Access publishers
are growing at an unbelievable pace, and driven by an increasing pace
of policy change from funders and governments our more traditional
competitors in the legacy publishing industry are scrambling to catch
up.”
~~

“From my perspective there are strong advantages to journal-mediated
Open Access supported by direct author side charges. When we buy a
publication service we can and should set the requirements on
immediate access and enabling re-use. But more importantly from my
perspective it also creates an explicit market in substitutable goods,
and this ultimately will bring the price of those services down —
assuming that we can create an effective market.

“Alongside this, repositories are a critical means of increasing
access at relatively low costs where journal-mediated access is not
available or appropriate. There are transitional paths for different
communities that rely to different extents on repositories and
journals but neither in their current form offers a long-term
solution.

“In the longer term we will need publication infrastructures that are
efficient, enable ongoing review, and support wide-ranging re-use.
These could be run by institutions, by communities, or by third party
providers. They will have some characteristics of repositories and
some of journals and some of publishers but will also be quite
different.”

~~

“Hybrid OA might be, or perhaps might have been, a viable transitional
strategy to support a fully engaged effort of legacy publishers to
move towards an Open Access footing. What we’re getting though is the
use of hybrid approaches to lock in the existing inefficiencies of big
deals.

“The scary thing is that libraries seem to be jumping to create big
APC deals, which will have exactly the same problems as the big
subscription deals.

Alongside the problems of double-dipping by receiving both
subscription and APC revenue for the same journal, and perhaps worse
some publishers charging colour and page charges *on top* of APCs this
isn’t an effective way to deliver a properly functioning market that
brings prices down.”

~~

“The single most important task today is putting in place robust and
transparent mechanisms to report on policy compliance, pricing, and
monitor the growth of access.

“This may seem rather prosaic but we have wildly different estimates
of the proportion and quantity of OA. Much of the fragmentation in
today’s debate is caused by people building arguments on contradictory
data. And it has been too easy for institutions and funders to
announce mandates without systems to monitor their success, let alone
enforce them.”

The Q&A can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/public-library-of-sciences-cameron.html

Richard Poynder