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by The American Physical Society (APS) has recently announced a program where most of their articles can be made publicly available to anyone who wishes to read them. In order for an article to be made "Free to Read," the APS requires a modest fee ($975/Physical Review article and $1300/Physical Review Letter article), which anyone can pay, and the article will then be available for download by the general public for free. This does not mean that the APS surrenders the copyright to these articles, nor can they be posted on any other websites without prior permission.
The APS freely admits that this program puts their subscription business at risk from "the possible loss of revenue due to loss of subscriptions if a large number of articles are converted to FREE TO READ, lack of sustainability in the event of lost subscriptions, and the loss of income and customers if it is necessary to revert back to the subscription model." The fee will only be used to partially offset this risk as the revenue will be primarily used to subsidize the subscriptions of small institutions. Additionally, if the APS decides to revert to the subscription only model, any and all articles that have been marked as "Free to Read" will remain accessible.
Several articles have been made publicly available already: the orginal paper on the EPR paradox in quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr's reply, and the July 1949 Special Issue of Reviews of Modern Physics that honored Einstein's 70th birthday. A list of articles that have been recently made available through this program is available as an RSS feed.
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Transparency by PowerPointSamurai :: NR7 :: Show
I honestly do not understand why scientific journals, especially ones funded by professional organizations (like IEEE, SAE, and APS), and others like AAAS (the journal Science) do not provide their content for free online. I know they have to pay the editorial board and the people who review the articles and such, but wait a minute...the whole point of these journals is to facilitate peer review in the first place.
I agree the editorial review board raises the bar and seperate the "wheat from the chaff" so scientists only spend their time on the best papers, but I think there should be a place for EVERYTHING to be seen--like OmniNerd. The latest quack "free energy" paper, or ones that look like they were written in crayon by a 2nd grader would be scored appropriately by members of the organization with feedback to the author and observations to other readers. Say a paper came in that was brilliant, but unpolished--lots of grammar and spelling errors, but on sound technical grounds. That would never make it in Nature, but this could be a diamond in the rough that other scientists could help polish up and mentor the poor guy/girl who wrote it.
So if members are paying their fees to be members and get the subscription, which pays for the editorial board and overhead, as well as the physical printing process, why can't they open their journals to the public in an electronic format? Government funded organizations have no excuse here either...oops, which includes virtually all major universities, the NAS (National Academy of Sciences), etc. I'm trying to read the NAS publication Rising Above the Gathering Storm, about the decline in US science and technology leadership and education right now. (By the way, you can download it or read it online, but it's kind of a pain). They cite dwindling technical literacy in the US as a major concern. I admit that I doubt people will jump online and download the whole IEEE Spectrum catalog if they openned it up, but at least it would be there.