The Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study
Source: The Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study I have been always interested in books and publishing. My mother owned a bookstore and I have been surrounded by books since I was born. How easy it has become in recent years to produce and distribute books and journals has lured me into attempting self publishing with “Beyond the Visible”, and nowadays our UV4Plants Bulletin and a couple of new books in preparation. The actual limitations are no longer technical or monetary in nature, just the time used by editors, reviewers, and of-course authors. Sometimes I marvel at being able to run a website, the depository of published articles and issues, an on-line manuscript management system and producing a journal with an ISSN number, and assigning each article a DOI, for a total cost of less than 40 € per month. How is this possible when commercial publishers may charge authors a few 1000 € per open-access article published? Part of the explanation is that we are using free software for all steps in the production of the Bulletin, and that the company providing web hosting to us is also doing the same. Of course developing software has a cost, at least in…
