When Franco Nori of Japan's RIKEN research institute published a paper on electromagnetic surface waves in Physical Review Letters earlier this year, he and his coauthors took an unusual step: They paid to make their paper freely available for anyone to read. The scheme, called “Free to Read” by PRL's publisher, the American Physical Society (APS), is part of the burgeoning open-access publishing market.
Traditionally, publishers have relied on revenue from libraries and other subscribers to cover their costs, but that's changing. “Open access is often used as a catchphrase to describe many different and competing business models,” says Mark Cassar, acting publisher of journals and technical publications at the American Institute of Physics (AIP, publisher of Physics Today). Business models for open access include authors paying up to $3000 per article—either as an option or, for open-access-only journals, as a requirement; institutions paying a $20 000 blanket...
