Graham and Ken, thanks for the kind words.
Ken, at the institution level, most of the momentum has been for OA archiving: the author publishes in whatever journal, open or not, and simply posts a copy of his paper online. A great deal of universities have opened an institutional repository in which faculty can deposit their papers. From the institution's perspective, it can create a place to showcase its scholarly output and help to disseminate it.
With regard to OA journals, there are some detractors.
I will not waste breathe on the PR pitbulls who shriek that OA journals spell the death of peer review; that is simply false. Peter Suber 1 and AR 2 have thoroughly rebutted this claim.
I am sure there many other dumb arguments against OA journals, but I try to mentally filter out such noise.
Any good arguments against OA journals will focus on the only way in which they are different from toll-access journals: i.e. that their content is made freely available online, that their content uses open licenses, and that (because they give away their content) a subscription-based business model will be very difficult to sustain.
On the first point: There are no good arguments that free online access is undesirable. Some may argue that the benefit is not worth the cost, but no reasoned argument will deny that there are indeed significant benefits. Some question how much demand there is for free online access, but my experience suggests the demand is quite real.
On the second point: Again, some question the necessity of open licensing, but I find there are many reasons why it is desirable.
The biggest question with open licensing, I would think, is allowing derivative works, out of quality control concerns. (There are no valid reasons, in my opinion, to preserve the “integrity” of a journal article, other than quality control concerns.) But, as I address in a post on my blog 3 , there is nothing to fear; at least, what little there is to fear is worth the opportunities it opens.
The other sort of uses that one might want to prevent via copyright, such as commercial use or redistribution, are only concerns insofar as they imperil a particular business model. I will address this further below.
To the final point, that the preceding two necessitate a shift in business models: It's true. If you can no longer extract rent from access or permission barriers, you'll need to find a new business model. What are these models? I'll copy Willinsky here:
Author fee: Author fees support immediate and complete access to open access journals (or, in some cases, to the individual articles for which fees were paid), with institutional and national member-ships available to cover author fees. e.g. BioMed Central
Subsidizied: Subsidy from scholarly society, institution and/or government/foundation enables immediate and complete access to open access journal. e.g. First Monday
Dual-mode: Subscriptions are collected for print edition and used to sustain both print edition and online open access edition. e.g. Journal of Postgraduate Medicine
Cooperative: Member institutions (e.g., libraries, scholarly associations) contribute to support of open access journals and development of publishing resources. e.g. German Academic Publishers
To elaborate a bit on the author fee model, I would break this down into two: full and hybrid. Full author fee journals are fully OA, with no subscription revenue. Hybrid journals charge subscriptions, but also offer individual authors the opportunity to pay to make their own articles OA; the theory is, the author fee offsets the loss in subscription revenue.
So, put differently, there are three fundamental publishing models for scholarly journals in a non-rivalrous digital environment:
Reader pays. (Where “reader” is a user online, not necessarily in print) If you don't pay, you can't have access. This is the subscription or “paywall” model used by toll-access journals. The journal's incentive, then, is to publish content that readers are most willing to pay for (or demand that their library pay for it). This has been a good incentive structure for high publication quality, but obviously provides a counterincentive to provide the widest access (the incentive is to widen access only towards the point where number of subscribers and revenue per subscriber are optimized).
Author pays. If you don't pay, your article can't be published. It sounds a bit like a vanity press when you put it that way, but reputable author-pays journals don't collect until after an article has been accepted, so there's no “pay-to-play”. (Reputable author-pays journals also have discounts or waivers for researchers who truly can't afford it.) The journal's incentive is to publish content that authors are most willing to pay for (usually from their research grants). This might sound like the journal's incentive will be to publish anything, and thus collect the most article processing fees. No doubt there will be a few journals that do this (as there have always been vanity presses), but I don't think most will go down this path. The publication process for an academic is all about prestige; if a journal is known to publish junk, it will have no prestige, and thus few academics interested in publishing there. So I think the incentive structure here, too, will support scholarly quality. If anything, the author pays incentive structure will support a change in quantity, I think, not in quality. Particularly if authors pays journals are completely electronic, whereas reader pays journals continue to publish a print edition, the reader pays journals are bound to a certain size (additional “Web only” content would be seen as having less prestige), whereas the author pays journals can publish as many or as few articles as they wish. In this case, I think the incentive for the author pays journals is to publish as many articles are of high quality and high interest, i.e. toward the optimal equilibrium between number of articles published and prestige per article. This might suggest that author pays journals will tend toward less journals with more articles per journal; or, since quantity is serialized, toward less-frequent issues with more articles per journal. Or, given that author pays journals mostly operate in electronic-only format, they might publish on a rolling schedule. . . At this point, I refer the reader to a game theorist, and will simply say that I don't think the author pays model will be the death of scholarly quality.
Third-party pays. If the sponsor doesn't pay, the author can't be published and the reader can't have access. This model has all the problems typically associated with the patron/donation/advertising/merchandising/promotional/what-have-you model. (Mitigated somewhat by the fact that your editors, referees, authors, etc. are still academics, and won't give their time to something with no prestige; if a journal starts printing nude centerfolds as ads for Playboy, I would expect defection from the academic labor, and so the journal would lose value. This is the essentially the same theory that the New York Times won't print bad journalism because it would make the paper less valuable.) On the other hand, if the cost of publishing is very low, this model may be very promising; so this could be a good fit for “no-frills” journals.
There may be separate issues that people mistaken attribute to OA, such as print vs. electronic, publication schedules, commercial vs. non-commercial publishers, etc. But, considering the diversity of business models for OA journals, none of them jumps out as a fundamentally flawed model; and if any of them are, I see no reason to think the market will be unable to self-correct. In OA publishing as it was with toll-access, I think there will be many different business models for journals, which will be operated by many different types of organizations. Some people have a problem with that uncertainty and say that OA publishing has no business model; I see the evolutionary benefits of diversity, and expect therefore that OA publishing will be with us for some time to come.
This is not to say there aren't many, many challenges, but I don't think of these will prove fatal.
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