Guardian Letters: 
Open access plan is no academic spring


Government plans to change the funding system for scientific publication have recently been aired which suggest that the cost of publication should be borne by authors and that the cost per published article (already smartly acronymed as APC=Article Processing Charge) would be about £2,000.
The Guardian published five letters on this issue today, including mine mentioned in the previous post:

Free access to British scientific research may be a laudable goal, but surely the APC to be paid by authors of £2,000 per article is a misprint – you mean £20, don't you, which I as an academic author could afford? But why should academic authors pay anything at all? They should bepaid for their articles. Furthermore, if the plan is for universities to foot the bill for authors, this will leave an important group of researchers, in sciences and humanities, out in the cold – those who do not have (or no longer have) any university affiliation. This is not the academic spring. 

Dr Tricia Cusack