Open access to scientific publications The good, the bad, and the ugly

Abstract

Open Access is a valuable goal, but the scientific community is overly naive about the whole business of scientific publishing. Societies and nonprofit organizations need to continue to lead the way to improve the dissemination of research results, but the scientific community at large must support them against the business-centric views of commercial publishers. Author fees are not a solution. Worse, they jeopardize the ecological balance of the research incentive structure. Finally, nonprofit publishers should take advantage of their unique position to experiment with sustainable evolutions of their publishing models.