Alan Story wrote: > Jan: > > Further on the question of open access by potential authors. > > A few questions re: BioMed Central waivers ( of the $500 article-processing > charge): .....
EPT is watching these discussions and trying to work out the impact of open access on developing country science. My understanding is that both the BMC $500 charge and the PloS $1500 charge are to cover the costs both of document conversion and peer review and I am not sure what % of these figures is for peer review. I do not understand why peer review costs are considered to be so high, since the reviewers give their professional skills for free and the other costs are merely mailing and record keeping. The whole process can now be automated, as has been done by the Canadian journal, Conservation Ecology (www.consecol.org). See also www.arl.org/sparc/ for other tools for automated peer reviewing. Once such tools are set up, peer review costs must be almost nil. For developing country scientific organisations, replacing one unaffordable cost (tolls) by another unaffordable cost (APC) is of little encouragement. Even though the APC costs are substantially less, and may be eliminated for developing country authors (if they can 'make a reasonable case', and see the query from Alan Storey), one must hope that these efforts are interim means of getting from 'here' to 'there'. To ensure the international scientific community has access to ALL research ouput, there must be a true level playing field. Only then can the 'missing' research generated in the developing world, and critical for international programmes (in AIDS/malaria/tuberculosis/environmental protection/biodiversity/taxonomy/ biosafety/biopolicy....) become part of mainstream knowledge. Only then can the isolation of the scientific community in under-resourced countries be overcome and international partnerships be established to the benefit of all of us. Carry out a search for 'malaria' on the non-profit distributor of many developing country journals, Bioline International, to see an example of the missing research. Use www.bioline.org.br and search from the homepage across all material on the system. My understanding has always been that the open access movement aimed to provide free access to institutional archives - free of costs both to the author and the reader. Any costs to be met would be borne by institutions, which have an interest in distributing their own research output in ways that make the greatest impact. Again, my understanding is that costs for setting up an institutional eprint server would be: an initial modest setting-up cost, some hand-holding costs for authors in preparing documents for the eprints servers, followed by low maintainenance costs. These could surely be 'absorbed' by most organisations. Essential peer review costs would be readily paid for by savings plus automation. And that sounds just fine for science in the developing world. Barbara Kirsop Electronic Publishing Trust for Development - www.epublishingtrust.org
