Paying the Bills
Open access is not free. By saying that up front, I hope to confound some of the more extreme critics of the open access movement, who sometimes pretend that all OA supporters are dreamy-eyed and woolly-headed librarians who imagine that all information “wants” to be free. So I start from the premise that open access costs money, but I do immediately need to qualify that statement. By definition, open access does not charge the consumers of information any fee for access. It is free in that sense, but not in the sense that there are no costs involved in producing the works or making them freely available.
See more at:
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2015/02/10/paying-bills/
Open access is not free. By saying that up front, I hope to confound some of the more extreme critics of the open access movement, who sometimes pretend that all OA supporters are dreamy-eyed and woolly-headed librarians who imagine that all information “wants” to be free. So I start from the premise that open access costs money, but I do immediately need to qualify that statement. By definition, open access does not charge the consumers of information any fee for access. It is free in that sense, but not in the sense that there are no costs involved in producing the works or making them freely available.
See more at:
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2015/02/10/paying-bills/