Sage Open has reduced their open access article processing fee to $99 per article. The announcement is posted here: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/press/2013/jan/24_jan.htm
This is not the first OA publisher to come out with prices in this range. PeerJ, established by Peter Binfield (formerly PLoS ONE), has open access fees on a lifetime membership basis starting from $99. This raises some interesting questions. For example: What is the real cost of publishing in an open access online environment? Sage OPEN and PeerJ are both commercial companies. If $99 is sufficient to cover the costs of coordinating peer review and publication, why would anyone pay even the $1,350 charged by PLoS ONE, never mind the $3,000 plus charged by some of the traditional publishers under hybrid arrangements? Is this an indication that transitioning to open access will indeed open up the inelastic market for scholarly journals to competition? best, Heather G. Morrison, PhD Freedom for scholarship in the internet age http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/2012/12/12/freedom-for-scholarship-in-the-internet-age-post-defence-version/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
