Quality and mandated open access

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

Peter Banks, in:  re:  October issue of the SPARC Open Access 
Newsletter, questions whether quality can be sustained with 
mandated open access.

There is already substantial evidence that the answer is yes.

There are over 2,400 fully open access, peer reviewed journals 
listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and the 
number of titles has been growing fairly consistently at the rate 
of about 1.5 per calendar day.  Peer review and open access are 
quite compatible. http://www.doaj.org

Self-archiving rates of 100% in some sub-areas of physics has 
been compatible with ongoing subscriptions.  This may seem 
counter- intuitive, from an economic point of view.  However, 
academic publishing is different from an economic viewpoint, 
because the customers and suppliers are largely the same group of 
people (researchers, their students and institutions).  Faculty 
understand very well the role of their journals, are very 
involved in decisions about subscriptions, and do not look for 
cancellations when articles are freely available thanks to 
self-archiving.

The article in the October SPARC Open Access Newsletter Peter 
Banks was referring to, Open Access and Quality, can be found at: 
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-06.htm#quality

Heather Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com