what? Authors should pay $3,000 if they want Open Access for making their stuff publicly available for others? Not sure I understand. Do you? - Attila Csordas

That sounds awfully expensive - Andrew Clegg

Obviously there's a price to pay to be OA. Someone has to pay for Free Access, too - Jim Hardy

more expensive than BMC, but understandable. - pn

I would really love to see a dollar-by-dollar breakdown of that $3000. - Colin Ashe

Is that in addition to page charges? Then no, or at least not until I'd exhausted the open-access options. - Chris Patil

I think since the authors are providing the content, and we are talking about academic articles here, you are getting into a weird area of Pay to Play/Publish that is a very slippery slope. The question is to have open access- should there be perhaps a yearly fee? Should regular subscriptions by libraries allow open access to web based content? What about medline? - Whitney Hoffman

so we put the burden on libraries? - pn

Springer's Open Access fee also used to be $3000 (I don't know what it has been recently). Oxford journals such as NAR charge reduced OA fees to publishers at institutions with a subscription, so the cost is basically shared between the institution/library and the author. The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii... subsidizes fees like this for those who can't charge them to a grant. @Whitney, in any respectable peer-reviewed journal authors are not presented with the choice of OA until *after* their article has been accepted, so I don't think there is any Pay to Publish weirdness. - Ruchira S. Datta

From the transfer of copyright form [http://www.liebertpub.com/media...] from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., about the NIH Public Access Policy: "In order to assist our authors who have NIH funding to comply with this policy, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. publishers will deposit the final accepted paper (after copy -editing and proofreading) to PubMed Central (PMC) on behalf of the authors. Authors need not take any action The manuscript’s public access posting on PMC will occur 12 months after final publication. This service is provided free of charge. Please note that authors may not deposit manuscripts directly to PMC or other sites without permission from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.". (Note the 12-month embargo, and the restriction on self-archiving). - Jim Till

The restriction on self-archiving and long embargo is likely to make some people think, hmm, I'll just send it to PLoS and not deal with that. - Mr. Gunn

Actually, Rejuvenation Research has no page charges http://www.liebertpub.com/product... So the $3000 is in line with the $2850 charged by PLoS Biology but significantly higher than PLoS ONE. Thus fees are RR>PB>PO whereas impact factor goes PB>RR>PO. - Chris Patil

Not much of a difference from other OA publications, as pointed out. Funding agencies are supporting line items for OA publications. I ask for $5000/yr routinely for publications in my grant applications. - Iddo Friedberg

Chris, IF won't remain that way forever, and I think it's a poor decision-making factor as well. - Mr. Gunn

For a recent post about Article-Level Metrics at PLoS, see: http://tinyurl.com/qwvfxc - Jim Till

Maybe instead of putting the burden on libraries it would take the burden off of libraries. Presumably, authors who want this will build it into their budget and it will be covered by grants, funding, etc and libraries will not have to buy a subscription to the journal. - Angela Hamilton

I also would suggest not confounding the OA/author pays model of publishing with the deposition. Nature Publishing Group for example mostly consists of subscription journals but these journals (including Nature itself) provide the automatic deposition to PMC (as described above by Jim Till) as a free service to authors. - Maxine

@Mr. Gunn - I don't make my decisions based on impact factor, and I agree that it's a poor basis for distinguishing between journals. I do think that that relative relationship of impact factors between those three journals is likely to remain the same for a while, however. - Chris Patil

A fish-supper, anyone ?? - plus I have a fine pot of Earl Grey on (the) simmer...... - Graham Steel

"the OA/author pays model" -- just to clarify, OA and "author side fees" (a more accurate term) are two different things. The majority of OA journals don't charge any author side fees (though the best known ones, PLoS and BMC, do), whereas many toll-access journals charge page and color fees in addition to their subscriptions. For details see Peter's comments here: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters... - Bill Hooker