OA Obstacles

It is approximated that there are over 20,000 legitimate peer-reviewed scholarly journals in existence today. Unfortunately, only around 10 to 15 percent of these journals are open access. This frequency is much too low, and quite frankly disappointing.

One possible cause of this is the existence of an option through which one may engage in “open access lite” as I call it. That is, depositing the paper or abstract in a central open access repository such as PubMed. This method is in fact very popular, and while it does offer some access to all, it simultaneously limits the ability of purely OA publishers to proliferate and prosper.

One logical antidote to this problem would be to encourage researchers to go 100% OA and actually publish their papers in an open access journal. Of course, this and similar assertions will be perpetually countered by those journals which profit off of the closed access model, as they lobby continuously to prolong the longevity of closed access publishing.

Nathan