RE: PNAS Introduces Open Access Publishing Option

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I suggest that this, though certainly welcome, may not be the best way to
experiment with open access:

First, it will not draw as many paying authors as would be if the fee
applied to all articles, but the Proceedings forgave or reduced it upon
request. This is admittedly a guess about human nature, though, not a
proven fact.

Second, it is confusing to readers. If one is not a subscriber or reading
at a subscribing institution, a link to PNAS for a current article means
the reader may or may not get the article, instead of meaning the reader
will get the article.

The best way, for a journal as strong as PNAS, with the result of a survey
saying half the prospective authors are already certainly willing, is
simply to go to it.  But regarding this as only a temporary step, surely
it is better to do it for individual articles than to not do it at all. I
hope PNAS will end the experiment and go to complete open access long
before Dec 31, 2005; they should think about alternative stopping
criteria. I think it reasonable that this change will go faster if other
comparable journals made a comparable experiment; if the other journals
were to select the same date, they too might find it possible to end the
experiment early.  In particular, I challenge Nature and Cell to follow
the same route; all the arguments that make it possible for PNAS apply to
them as well.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu