The OA discussion at the Society for Neuroscience

Jake Young has blogged extensive notes on the OA discussion at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How Will it Affect You? (Atlanta, October 16, 2006).  For a summary of Young's summary, see Dave Munger's blog notes.  Excerpt from Munger's briefer version:

• The current "market-based" scholarly publishing system is primarily paid for by governments: Researchers and libraries get grants, and the grants pay for subscriptions to journals.
• This system limits access: not everyone has access to libraries, and not all libraries have equal access....
• All the panelists agreed that since it's all government money anyway, the same research could be published under an "open access" model and made freely available to all.
• Not to belabor the point, but this would be a better system.
• The problem comes when you get down to details: the Public Library of Science, for example, already publishes several excellent journals in this way, but requires authors to pay a fee of up to $2,500 when the work is published, to cover editing, typesetting, and administrative costs. This could be a problem because not all researchers can afford the fee, so good research may go unpublished. (However, additional grants could be made available for these cases. Remember, it's all the same pile of money.)
• The bigger problem appears to be that publishers are unwilling to let go of their empires: Elsevier publishes over 1,500 journals, and makes a tidy profit doing so. Moving to a completely new model would be economically unstable to them, so they prefer to stick with the old system.
• Publishers appear incapable of understanding that there are other ways of distributing information. I'd like to see some wikipedia-style journals, some efforts to peer-review blogs, and some other, more efficient models developed. While peer review is a very good idea that shouldn't be abandoned, it's not necessarily the only way to distribute reliable research results.