Book review: "Open Access: What you need to know"

Abstract

OA also has the potential to alleviate the problems caused by rapid price increases for science, technology, engineering, and medical (STEM) journals, which consume a disproportionate and growing share of academic and special library budgets, although Crawford acknowledges that alleviating cost pressures requires bargaining by an influential and determined library system or the availability of a critical mass of OA journals. Crawford discusses the significant differences of opinion surrounding questions, such as the value that publishers add to scholarly articles, what it should cost to produce an online journal, whether or to what extent complete OA would save money, whether "delayed OA" makes sense or simply prolongs subscription journals, whether green or gold OA is preferable, whether OA journals that do not charge author-side fees are sustainable, and whether institutional mandates for depositing articles in repositories are effective.