Stuart Shieber at The Occasional Pamphlet argues the merits of “gold OA” in a recent blog post. Gold open access can be defined as the author or representing institution making a payment at the time of publication, and the publication being completely free to anyone thereafter. From the blog post:
…access is the least important of the services that journals currently provide—least important because technological advances have led to the ability to provide access at essentially zero marginal cost by the authors themselves. The important and valuable services that publishers provide in greater or lesser quantity are management of peer review, a variety of production services, and imprimatur.
Thanks to Peter Suber at Open Access News for the link.
