Increasingly, our access to scientific information is becoming a research topic in itself. Thus an analysis of big deal journal bundles[1] has attracted much interesting commentary (including one from a large scientific publisher[2]). In the UK, our funding councils have been pro-active in promoting the so-called GOLD publishing model, where the authors (aided by grants from their own institution or others) pay the perpetual up-front publication costs (more precisely the costs demanded by the publishers, which is not necessarily the same thing) so that their article is removed from the normal subscription pay wall erected by the publisher and becomes accessible to anyone. As the proportion of GOLD content increases, it was anticipated (hoped?) that the costs of accessing the remaining non-GOLD articles via a pay-walled subscription would decrease.
References
- T.C. Bergstrom, P.N. Courant, R.P. McAfee, and M.A. Williams, "Evaluating big deal journal bundles", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111, pp. 9425-9430, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403006111
- C. Woolston, "Secret publishing deals exposed", Nature, vol. 510, pp. 447-447, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/510447f