Dear colleagues,

This is to give you my personal opinion on the model for OpenResearch
journals. I currently lead a research network funded by the Spanish
ministry of education in which one of the tasks is to start a new
open access journal (in spanish), so that I was somehow forced to
reflect on the topic.

After reading many articles, I found that there is a variety of open
access economic models. However, the well-known ones charge the
authors of papers (or their institutions) fees that in my opinion are
high. This is ok for funded research, but is not fair for disciplines
or researchers that in a moment of their career have not the required
finantial support for a project or concrete research issue. This lead
me to search for an alternate model for my research network, and I
came to the following model:

1) An annual fee for Program comittee members (or their
institutions), around 80 euros.
2) A low fee per published paper for authors, around 30 Euros. Fees
in BMC for example, range from 300 to 1000+ euros.
(these are only rough figures)

With this, and using Spanish labour costs, one can cover four issues
per year (of 80+ pages), full Web maintenance, and a limited hardcopy
edition (about 100 copies) just to send them for storage to major
(physical) libraries around the world.

Even though it may be surprising that EB members pay a fee, this
makes them more committed to the journal, since the role of EB
members in open access is expected to be much more active and
enthusiast than in conventional journals. Further, being EB member or
reviewer in a journal is considered often important for promotion and
evaluation, so that it is as reasonable as author fees, at least from
my "spanish" perspective.

Further, another issue is that of quality. Open access requires *fast
turnaround* in the review process, let's say an average of six weeks.
This means active reviewers and EB members, if we don't want quality
to be compromised. In addition, the use of citation impact measures
should be tracked by the journal authors and editors, complementary
of course to fight for being indexed in major indexes, and of course,
on ISI JCR.

Summing up, I would be very glad to hear your opinions on the
economic model and on the policy for quality.

Best regards,
Miguel-Angel Sicilia
http://www.cc.uah.es/msicilia