Why pay open access fees?

Open access brings more citations, apparently, reports The Scientist.

Open Access publishing* has developed mainly since 2000, when Biomedcentral (BMC) started publishing, using the new OA publishing business model. Under this model access to all articles is free but authors are charged a publication (or dissemination) fee. BMC started a large number of titles simultaneously some of which have thrived although some of their titles occupy lower niches in the hierarchy. They were followed by OA publishers Public Library of Science (PLoS) who have explicitly gone for quality papers. Many other OA titles now exist - the Directory of Open Access Journals contains over 2000 titles - including established journals from traditional publishers. Oxford University Press and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) both have at least one fully OA title.

Some other publishers have adopted a more cautious approach by adopting a hybrid approach. Under this model readers need a subscription as normal to view most articles in a journal, unless the author has opted to pay an OA fee to make access open. Springer and Blackwells are two big publishers to adopt this model, along with Company of Biologists and PNAS. OUP also have a number of hybrid titles. From 2007 the EMBO Journal and the British Journal of Pharmacology (both published by NPG) will become hybrid.

Clearly if you want to publish in a journal that is fully OA then you will have to pay their maunscript charge. If you publish in a hybrid OA journal you have the choice to pay or not to pay. Why would you choose to pay such an optional charge?

• Increased access - to ensure that there are no subscription barriers to anyone reading your article
• Increased impact - there is a growing body of evidence that OA affects the citation rate of an article (see article about PNAS experience)
• Importance of the work - because you believe this article is so important that it should receive the maximum readership
• Ideological reasons - because you believe OA is a good thing in and of itself

It's not clear whether the hybrid model will be the way to successfully bridge from today's world of subscription charges to a tomorrow's world of dissemination charges, or whether it is the road to nowhere. Many see full OA journals and author self-archiving as more realistic routes to change.

* For an overview of what Open Access is.