Open access policy at Reviews in Health Care

Abstract

[The abstract of this article is not available. Here are the first sentence of the interview with Peter Suber. The complete interview is freely available upon registration]

Peter Suber (http://bit.ly/suber) is Berkman Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Researcher at SPARC, the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. He conducts research, writing, consulting, and advocacy on open access and related topics.

Q: The aim of open access is to remove access barriers to publication. Don’t you think that fee-based model can be an obstacle for authors in less-developed countries?

A: Fee-based OA journals don’t work as well as no-fee OA journals in fields and countries where most research is unfunded. But it’s important to remember that the vast majority of OA journals (70%) charge no publication fees at all. The percentage is even higher for OA journals published in developing countries. For example, nearly all the OA journals published in India are no-fee. It’s equally important to remember that green OA, or OA through repositories, is an inexpensive alternative to gold OA, or OA through journals.