I was alerted to this post by a patient advocate I know via PatientsLikeMe. The short version is that some of the articles have clearly been paid for to be open-access ($900 USD), but when you look at a recent copy of the journal you are prompted to enter a user-name and password as if you were paying for the article like normal, and in fact the buttons to pay for it remain there.

It’s a similar case for a journal run by the American Chemical Society.

Is this part of a wider problem? Petermr’s blog would certainly suggest so. He’s very involved in the open-access movement and is even starting to grade the different publishers on their clarity and accessibility.

This is particularly relevant for me at the moment as I just got something published in a Blackwell journal and was considering paying a £1,300 fee to make it open access. In actual fact I think I can archive the pre-review version for free with my institutional archive, which is handy as I don’t exactly have £1,300 stuffed into my desk drawers in £20 bills…

Anyway. The current state of affairs seems to be this: publishers are worried about OA and have cobbled together business models that support generating revenue in other ways that the typical subscriber model. However, they don’t appear to have put much thought in to the publishing model.