Abstract

Paul Peters
Hindawi Corporation, Cairo, Egypt

Beyond Access

Advocates of open access publishing have tended to focus on the benefits that an open access model can have in improving access to scholarly literature. While it is clear that enabling unrestricted online access is an essential part of any open access model, it is also important to understand the implications that a new business model will have on the economics of scholarly publishing. An open access model that is funded with publication charges, paid from the research budget of accepted authors, has the potential to create a far more efficient market for scholarly journals than currently exists in the subscription world. However, several alternative open access models that have been proposed either fail to address the inefficiencies of the subscription model, or introduce new inefficiencies that will likely have a negative impact on the market for scholarly journals. This paper will first examine the advantages of a publication fee based open access model; then, it will evaluate several alternative models for open access, in terms of their impact on the efficiency of the scholarly publishing market.