Peter Suber in is book entitled " open access" goes on to describe open access literature as "digital, online, free of charge and free of most copy right and licensing restrictions"(Suber, 2012). What Suber is essentially trying to say that it is a form of giving free relevant information to the reader. This new form of publishing has changed the way we look for information and even improved learning and general accessibility and knowledge of technology. But how does this form of publishing make money?
The truth is that most of these websites do not make money because they have been set up with the intention of spreading free accessible information, a good example of this would be Wikipedia which is a non profit organization who rely on public donations to pay for general maintenance costs. but there are a few ways in which they can gain profit.
- Most open access publishing is fund through public donations due to the nature in which the information is available.
- An obvious method of raising funds would be online advertising, but this would only aid the publisher of the open access journal rather than the author.
- Allot of publishing houses opposed the idea of an open access journal as they did not see any means of revenue being created from it. What ended up happening was a new "hybrid" scheme was created "under which the publisher’s principal source of revenue remained library subscriptions but a number of articles were published on open access in selected journals at the request of authors."(Friend, 2013)
Though open access is a free to view medium for information, it does however cost money to publish and up keep of the medium that it is on. research found that "28% of researchers grant money was used, in 55% of cases overhead funding from grants or the department was used, and in only 12% of cases the researchers paid themselves."(Bjork & Solomon, 2014)
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Bjork, b. Solomon, D. 2014 Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges. Luxembourg. Open access publishing. available at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk /stellent/groups /corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtp055910.pdf.
Suber, P. 2012. Open Access. Cambridge. MIT Press. Available at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262517638_Open_Access_PDF_Version.pdf. accessed on 24th November 2014.
Friend, F. 2011.OPEN ACCESS BUSINESS MODELS FOR RESEARCH FUNDERS AND UNIVERSITIES. Hellsinki. Knowledge Exchange.