This screen is a total bummer. “You do not have access”? “Purchase this article for $12″? I already paid for this item, in foregone tax revenue and subsidies to higher education.
This is from AMSTAT, the magazine of the American Statistical Association:
The most common substitute at this point for subscriptions revenue is an author-funded model in which a fee is charged to the author for the privilege of publishing the article. In many instances, “author-funded” is not quite accurate, as the fees can come from the research grants that supported the research. Researchers without such support, however, have to pay the fees themselves.
Of course, this changes the problem from one of being able to afford subscription fees to being able to afford author fees.
I very much prefer this model, for every reason.
I envision a world where most authors will be able to afford the publication fees much the same way they can afford to do the research in the first place (they receive grant funding), some minority of authors who cannot obtain funding didn’t have papers worth publishing anyway (which is likely to the extent that grant-makers are good at separating the wheat from the chaff), and in the worst case scenario some number of authors cannot afford the publication fees even though their paper is worth publishing, in which case they either have to pay the fee out of their own pockets or they can’t publish this paper in an open-access journal.
In that worst-case scenario, where worthy papers don’t get the grant funding needed to cover the publication fee, it’s worth noting that Steven Levitt has estimated that an article published in a top-tier economics journal will earn the author on average something like $100,000 over the course of his/her lifetime, by helping the author receive tenure, sell books, publish other papers, gain notoriety, speaking opportunities, etc. And if that is even a remotely accurate estimate, then even the most destitute and undeserving of authors should be able to find a way to publish that article, if indeed it’s worth publishing, because in the long-run it will be worth it.
So I really do believe that in most, if not all, cases the author will come up with the money to cover the publication fee, assuming the paper does deserve to be published.
And the benefit of this system is that once the author does manage to publish the work, it is out there for anyone to read. It is “open.” It will be more widely disseminated. It’s better than JSTOR. That will boost the value of the paper to the author, to other researchers who read and cite the paper, to the authors’ institutions and benefactors and those of others who read and cite the paper, to the paper’s lay readers, and most importantly to the public, which subsidizes higher education from every direction for no other purpose than to produce knowledge, which is rightly considered a public good.
So there you have it, a way to fund open-access journals.