I was surprised that Paul Guinnessy’s story “Stakeholders Weigh Costs of Open-Access Publishing” (Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 8 2007 29 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2774090 August 2007, page 29 ) didn’t mention page charges as an alternative to open-access author charges. A number of society-published journals, Physical Review Letters and the Journal of Chemical Physics among them, continue to balance reasonable page charges with reasonable subscription rates. The American Physical Society was forced to discontinue that model in the face of competition with commercially published journals that have no page charges but very high subscription rates. Even without page charges, the American Institute of Physics and APS continue to offer journals—for example, Physical Review—at a very reasonable subscription rate compared with commercial counterpart Nuclear Physics. Costs to subscribing institutions are a concern, but isn’t the primary issue the cost of commercially published journals and their associated portfolio pricing deals (for example, access to all of a publisher’s journals)?
I share David Stern’s concern about the possible loss of quality that may accompany widespread open access. Open access is primarily driven by the needs of the medical community and its patients. Shouldn’t open-access experiments be conducted and refined there first, before we attempt to impose it on all of science and technology?
