boaiforum messages

Could I, once more, ask Richard Poynder (and many others) not to confuse Gold ↵
OA and APC-Gold.

APC-Gold is uncovering problems that had not been anticipated at first. Poynder ↵
mentions one in his note, and assigns it to the whole Gold OA. Predatory ↵
journals exist only because the APC-Gold business model opens the door to this ↵
odious kind od polluting and parasitic behaviour. However, and I repeat, ↵
APC-Gold is but one subset of Gold OA.

Is it so difficult to understand?

Just to make things very, very clear: Gold OA is agnostic with regard to ↵
business plans, and it does not limit itself to one business plan. This is a ↵
form of thinking-in-a-box that requires the breaking of the box.

Jean-Claude Guédon
________________________________
De : boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk [boai-forum-bounces AT ↵
ecs.soton.ac.uk] de la part de Richard Poynder [richard.poynder AT cantab.net]
Envoyé : mardi 31 mars 2015 08:10
À : boai-forum AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
Objet : [BOAI] The Life and Death of an Open Access Journal: Q&A with ↵
Librarian Marcus Banks

Despite their high profile advocacy for open access, many librarians have ↵
proved strangely reluctant to practice what they preach. As late as last year ↵
calls were still being made for the profession to start “walking the talk”.

On the other hand, many librarians have embraced OA, particularly medical ↵
librarians. In 2001, for instance, the Journal of the Medical Library ↵
Association (JMLA) began to make its content freely available on the Internet. ↵
And in 2003 Charles Greenberg, then at the Yale University Medical Library, ↵
launched an open access journal with BioMed Central called Biomedical Digital ↵
Libraries (BDL). One of the first to join the editorial board (and later to ↵
take over as Editor-in-Chief) was Marcus Banks, who was then working at the US ↵
National Library of Medicine.

Four years later, however, BDL became a victim of BMC’s decision to increase ↵
the cost of the article-processing charges (APCs) it levies. This meant that ↵
few librarians were able to afford to publish in the journal any longer, and ↵
submissions began to dry up. Despite several attempts to move BDL to a ↵
different publishing platform, in 2008 Banks had to make the hard decision to ↵
cease publishing the journal.

What do we learn from BDL’s short life? In advocating for pay-to-publish gold ↵
OA did open access advocates underestimate how much it costs to publish a ↵
journal? Or have publishers simply been able to capture open access and use it ↵
to further ramp up what many believe to be their excessive profits? Why has ↵
JMLA continued to prosper under open access while BDL has withered and died? ↵
Was BDL unable to compete with JMLA on a level playing field? Could the demise ↵
of BDL have been avoided?  What, if anything, does the journal’s fate tell us ↵
about the future of open access?

These and other questions are discussed with Banks in a Q&A interview here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-life-and-death-of-open-access.html

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[BOAI] Re: The Life and Death of an Open Access Journal: Q&A with Librarian Marcus Banks