Some authors believe that OA publications do not receive proper recognition. They worry that this will impact negatively on the recognition of their achievements and on their grant applications thereby proving detrimental to their academic career. This concern is often explained with reference to the fact that Open Access journals are not well established and do not enjoy a high reputation. An undermining of quality control is also feared, because a business model based on publication fees (sometimes called article-processing charges or APCs) is considered to offer an incentive to accept sub-standard manuscripts.
This argument can be countered by pointing out that a journal's reputation is not a question of the business model it uses. High and low-quality output can be found in both commercial and non-commercial publishers and journals and in toll-free and toll-based publications. If one takes the Impact Factor (IF) as an albeit controversial yardstick for quality, the IF of OA journals is not always high because many journals have been launched only quite recently. (Since the reference period is two years, an IF is issued in the third year of publication at the earliest.) However, a number of OA journals have managed to achieve high impact factors within a short space of time. The journal PLoS Biology is one prime example. Its IF for 2006 was 14.1, the one for 2008 was 12.7, by far the highest rate of all (general) biology journals. Moreover, like any other editors, the editors of OA journals are interested in high-quality contributions, because high quality automatically attracts a broad spectrum of authors and low quality acts as a competitive disadvantage.
There are also reservations about the quality of documents deposited in subject-based and institutional repositories. Subject-based repositories are mainly geared towards the communication and discussion of research results by a particular community, whereas institutional repositories are the digital archives of the scientific and scholarly output of faculty members, research staff and students of a particular institution. Preprints and working papers are subjected to peer commentary and self-regulation by the scientific and scholarly community, which ensures a degree of quality control, while documents such as dissertations and post-doctoral theses usually meet high quality standards in any case. Furthermore, institutional and subject-based repositories often accept only postprints. In other words, in addition to publishing in a conventional journal, the refereed, quality-assured version of the manuscript is self-archived. This is known as the green road to OA.
Authors of OA contributions want to be sure that the long-term findability, readability and authenticity of their work is assured. Repository operators and OA journal editors are increasingly focusing on these justified demands. To ensure findability, documents are not only stored safely and permanently, they are also linked to searchable metadata. The Content Enrichment Projects funded by the EU programme eContentplus demonstrate the advantages of enrichment with well-defined and structured metadata. The EU programme aims to make digital content in Europe more accessible by coordinating corresponding activities on a European level. Usually access to documents is also assured via so-called persistent identifiers such as URN, DOI, PURL etc. The European Library brings together the digital contents of 47 European national libraries.
It is a common experience that documents found on the Internet can no longer be located after a few weeks, months or years. This everyday observation gives rise to justified concerns about the long-term findability of OA documents.
Questions of lasting findability and authenticity are always on the agenda of national and international initiatives dealing with the long-term storage of digital resources.
These initiatives include nestor, kopal, the eDepot of the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and Portico. Nestor, a collaborative project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, addresses the issue of long-term storage of digital resources in Germany. Kopal, another collaborative project funded by the German Research Ministry, aims to develop and operate a national archive system. The archiving and preservation of academic journals such as those published by BioMed Central is one main focus of the National Library of the Netherlands (KB).
At present, subject-based and institutional repositories guarantee only medium-term availability of their collections because they focus primarily on meeting current research and teaching needs. German archives which obtain DINI certification undertake to store documents for at least five years. However, long-term availability is essential, especially for primary OA publications. In future, long-term availability is to be ensured in Germany by mandating that digital versions of OA publications be archived with the German National Library.
In addition to the question of the findability of OA documents, authors and readers also want to be sure that, over the course of time, the content has not been changed or corrupted in any significant way and that the object was generated by the said author, at the said time. The question of document authenticity is therefore of great importance for repository operators and editors of OA journals. DINI Certification obliges repositories to take measures to ensure the authenticity of archived documents. One such measure is the digital signature.
Some authors worry that they will have copyright problems if they deposit their work in repositories. These concerns relate to potentially concurrent exploitation rights in cases where the article in question has already appeared in a journal or where publication is planned at a later date. Moreover, authors wish to retain control over the later use of their work by others. Copyright licences can prove useful in this case.
For further information and recommendations on this topic, see Legal issues.
One frequent criticism levelled at OA relates to publishing costs. Are scholars and scientists, universities and research organisations really in a position to finance the publication-fee model? This leads to the question of what OA publications actually cost and how these costs compare to those of conventional publications. It is not possible to give an explicit answer here. Basically, however, OA publications are more cost-efficient from the distribution point of view because there are no printing and marketing costs. The costs of organising peer review are probably the same for OA and non-OA publications. However, the actual cost structures in OA publishing houses are very different from those of conventional publishers which makes comparison difficult. There are cost calculations and estimates that demonstrate the economic viability of Open Access publishing (see, for example, Thomé & Barth, p. 14), and some Open Access publishers provide insight into their business models (see, for example, Copernicus Publications). In a report for JISC, John Houghton et al. take all economic factors into account and come to the conclusion that OA publishing has the greatest economic advantages and is therefore the cheapest option overall.
There is no doubt that a general conversion to an OA publishing model would involve a change in the financial burden on individual universities and research organisations. If authors rather than users have to pay for publication, then research-intensive organisations with high publication rates would have to pay more than those organisations who publish less.
In the natural sciences – and to a certain extent in economics – a general conversion to OA would put an end to cross-subsidisation through journal subscriptions paid by the corporate sector which usually publishes less than universities and research organisations. This problem would be exacerbated by the fact that the corporate sector often has to pay higher journal subscriptions than universities.
Not all scholars and scientists can easily pay publication fees from their research funds or other sources. This has social, research policy and university policy implications:
Scholars and scientists want to spend as little time as possible providing online access to their work. As a result, some have reservations about the amount of time needed for self-archiving. However, according to a study by Carr and Harnad (2005), even researchers who self-archive a lot do not need to spend more than 40 minutes a year on the task. However, those who also make an effort to find out more about the technique of good archiving will usually end up investing more time at the beginning. Subject-based and institutional repositories which are professionally maintained offer support in this regard. And more and more university libraries are responding to researchers' understandable concerns about the time needed to self-archive, by offering to do the job for them.
OA is considered to be an economic challenge to some scholarly-society presses who publish moderately-priced, high-quality journals and other media and are dependent on revenue from subscriptions and sales. In cases where conversion to Open Access business models is not viable, such publishers could consider entering into a partnership with repository operators who would be in a position to make their content openly accessible, either immediately or after an embargo period where appropriate.
Open access to scholarly and scientific information for everyone can have unwanted consequences, for example when it causes medical patients to worry. However, firstly, in today's information society this is not a specifically OA problem. And secondly, withholding information can also be viewed critically. If anything, it is an advantage of OA that high quality information is made available to patients as a counterbalance to the widespread scientific misinformation on the Internet.