Is Open Access Right for Astronomy?

Mahoney, T. J.
Bibliographical reference

Library and Information Services in Astronomy VI: 21st Century Astronomy Librarianship, From New Ideas to Action. Proceedings of a conference held Feb. 14-17, 2010 in Pune, Maharashtra, India. Edited by Eva Isaksson, Jill Lagerstrom, András Holl, and Nirupama Bawdekar. ASP Conference Series, Vol. 433. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2010, p.167

Advertised on:
10
2010
Number of authors
1
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
The underlying ethos of Open Access is that the public should have the right to free access to the published results of all publicly funded academic and scientific research. Such has been the political success of OA campaigners that some funding agencies (e.g. Wellcome) now make OA publication of funded research a necessary condition for the award of grants. Learned societies and publishers in astronomy are now looking at ways of best implementing OA in varying degrees of rigour. However, OA does not mean costless access: somewhere down the line, somebody has to pay for the added value (professional copyediting and typesetting, presentation, anonymous peer review, etc.) supplied to author manuscripts by learned-society and commercial publishers in the better journals. I take a critical look at the methods of finance employed within astronomical publishing and review the different flavours of OA. I also raise the question of whether it might make more sense to ensure free access to authors rather than to readers.