For those of you, like me, interested in open access, there’s more good news. There’s good evidence that the scales are finally tipping to the side of open access. If things continue, we could soon see open access considered the default choice and paywalls considered an anachronism.
The proximate event is the decision by the American Astronomical Society to open source all of its journals. One could argue, of course, that it’s easier for a professional society such as AAS to open source its journals than it is for commercial publishers such as Elsevier to do so because their business models depend on people paying to read the material they publish.
Still, professional societies tend to publish some of the most prestigious journals in their respective fields so if most of the societies adopt open access, researchers will still be able to find top notch open access homes for their papers. Once a majority of researchers stop publishing in the commercial journals with paywalls, those publishers will have to fall in line and offer the same type of deal that AAS is.
That deal boils down granting unlimited access to the papers in exchange for the researchers—or really their institutions—paying a publishing charge. That’s what’s known as a page charge in today’s system. It turns out that publishing a commercial journal can be outrageously profitable—Elsevier, alone, makes billions every year—so in a sense the party will be over for them but there’s no reason they can’t make a reasonable profit while still doing the right thing.
Whether it’s government and the funding agencies insisting on open access or competition from the already free journals, it seems like the days of the academic paywall are coming to an end.