Is open access the new vanity publishing?.

This article offers insights on issues related to open-access publishing. For the author, open access is not a free publication system, however, it incurs costs just as on-paper traditional journal publishing does; the model used by many open-access publishers, whereby the author pays a fee on publication, derives from STM grants and awards practice and disadvantages social science and humanities authors who typically receive no costs of publication elements in their grants, or researchers who self-fund. The move to open-access publication may harm the publication business of many learned societies, large and small, to the detriment of their scholarly activities and thus cause their members disbenefit. The author believed that open access is a useful model whereby researchers, primarily in the sciences and predominantly in the Anglo-American publishing, can communicate their research results to their peers. He also accepted that self-archiving is one method of storing and allowing retrieval of published papers, or works in progress. In several disciplines and in many countries, electronic publishing of research papers whether in open-access formats or in subscription or other paid-on-publication models will not be desirable, convenient or effective.