Lo stato dell'arte delle riviste in OA

Stuart Shieber propone la seguente analisi:

"OA journals are currently at a significant disadvantage with respect to subscription journals, because universities and funding agencies subsidize the costs of subscription journals in such a way that authors do not need to trade off money used for the subsidy against money used for other purchases ... The solution is clear: universities and funding agencies should underwrite reasonable OA publication fees just as they do subscription fees. But how should this be done? Each kind of institution needs to provide its fair share of support ...
Funding agencies ... should do so in a way that respects several important criteria:

1. They level the playing field completely, at least for cost-efficient OA journals.
2. They recognize that publication of research results often occurs after grants have ended.
3. They provide incentive for publishers to switch revenue model to the OA publication fee model, or at least provide no disincentive.
4. They avoid the moral hazard of insulating authors from the costs of their publishing.
5. They don’t place an undue burden on funders that would require reducing the impact of research they fund.

Of course, many funders already allow grantees to pay for OA publication fees from their grants. But this method falls afoul of some of this criteria ... One of the nice properties of this approach is that it doesn’t require synchronization of the many actors involved. Each funding agency can unilaterally start providing OA fee reimbursement along these lines. Until a critical mass do so, the costs would be minimal. Once a critical mass is obtained, and journals feel confident enough that a sufficient proportion of their author pool will be covered by such a fund to switch to an open-access revenue model, subscription fees to libraries will drop, allowing for overhead rates to be reduced commensurately to cover the increasing underwriting costs ..."

How should funding agencies pay open-access fees? The Occasional Pamphlet