Open Access

Misunderstanding: OA is about bypassing peer review.

It has never been true that OA is about bypassing peer review.  The OA movement focuses on OA for peer-reviewed literature.  The goal is to remove access barriers, not quality filters. 

Misunderstanding: Okay, then, but OA journals skimp on peer review

OA journals can use the same peer review procedures, the same standards, and even the same people as toll access (TA) journals.  This isn't hypothetical, and actually happens whenever established TA journals convert to OA.  The key variables in journal quality are the quality of authors, the quality of editors, and the quality of referees, all of which are independent of the journal's price or medium.

Misunderstanding: OA journals couldn't possibly pay their bills

Journals that charge publication fees have revenue from the fees.  Journals that charge no fees use a variety of business models, often relying on subsidies rather than revenue.  The long-term viability of new OA journals (like new TA journals) can only be assessed in the long term, but we can already point to a group of OA journals and publishers which have gone beyond revenue to profits or surpluses:  BioMed Central, Hindawi, Medknow, the Optical Society of America, and PLoS ONE. 

Misunderstanding: OA deprives authors of royalties

The misunderstanding here is to transplant the idea of OA from the domain of royalty-free literature like journal articles, where it originated, to the domains of royalty-producing literature like novels.  The OA movement focuses on journal literature for the good reason that journals don't pay authors for their work and generally don't pay editors and referees who facilitate peer review either. 

Misunderstanding: Post-print archiving violates copyright

One mistake here is to assume that TA publishers don't or can't consent to OA.  But they do and can.  Today between 51 and 70+% of surveyed TA publishers give advanced permission for postprint archiving, depending on which figures you accept. 

Misunderstanding: Self-archiving takes too much time

Les Carr and Stevan Harnad have shown that in the wild self-archiving takes about 10 minutes per paper.  This is isn't the time required by practiced archivangelists racing the clock, but the time shown on the user logs of a much-used repository.  For scholars who publish a paper a month, and who have an average amount of help from co-authors, librarians, students, or assistants, self-archiving takes less than 40 minutes per year.

Misunderstanding: OA invites plagiarism

The real thought here seems to be that OA sources make cutting and pasting easier than TA sources do.  Hence OA sources "invite" plagiarism from the plagiarism-inclined.  If so, then the objection is really to digital scholarship at large, not just the OA subset of digital scholarship.  Most TA journals have digital editions today, and the trend is to drop the print editions.  There is far more digital TA journal literature than OA journal literature.

Misunderstanding: OA helps readers but not authors

The 350 year old custom under which scholars write journal articles without payment only works because scholarly authors get something else out of the deal.  What they get is circulation of their ideas, or better, circulation with a time-stamp.  They may hope to earn royalties from their books, but they write journal articles for impact, not for money.  Journals began displacing books in the 17th century as the showcase for cutting-edge research because they could promise greater and quicker impact.  The data now show OA journal literature has the same advantage over non-OA journal literature.