Page 64 - Becoming Metric Wise

54 Becoming Metric-Wise

3.2.3 Gold OA and Who Pays the Costs?
In the words of Subbiah Arunachalam the OA movement has as ultimate
goal to “reach the unreached” (Arunachalam, 2002). These ideas led to a
new business model for journals. Articles published in journals such as
Biomed Central or the PLOS are freely available to anyone. Publishing
costs, including maintenance of the journals’ websites, are borne by
authors or their institutes. Often, publishing costs are included when sub-
mitting an application for a project, so that it is actually the sponsor (often
this means the government, through some agency) who pays. This has led
to a dichotomy in publishing models: OA publishing and subscription
access (sometimes also referred to as toll-access).
For some OA journals the author must pay the publication costs (they
have to pay article processing charges, in short APCs), while others are
completely free for authors. In such cases there is another sponsor who
pays for the publication costs. Rodrigues and Abadal (2014) have shown
that this model is paramount in Brazil and Spain. In these countries, alter-
natives to the “author pays” system are based on economic, technical,
and political support for scientific journals by governments, universities,
and associations. There also exist hybrid models which are embargoed or
permanently priced journals, but in which the author(s) may pay the costs
to make their article OA. Note that some society journals such as Physical
Review had page charges already in the 1970s (and probably earlier). In
this way access was made easier (i.e., cheaper) for society members.

3.2.4 Retrieving Articles

In the OA vision, scientists and their institutes (and not publishers) are
responsible for making the scientific literature freely available. For this to
happen having repositories does not suffice. The retrieval function must
also be considered. When each university or research institute has its own
repository these data sets become highly dispersed. In the case of reposi-
tories, this aspect is taken care of by harvesters such as: OAIster, Scientific
Commons and Google Scholar. Moreover, cooperation agreements have
been made. Examples are: Escholarship (University of California) and
DARE (Digital Academic Repository) in the Netherlands. DRIVER
(Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), a
European initiative to connect European repositories, offers retrieval in a
user-friendly way and provide technical support for the development of
new repositories (http://driver-community.eu). DRIVER resulted in