Is it worth ‘flipping’ your favourite journal to open access? An opinion

Abstract

In the course of 2019, a new open access journal called Magnetic Resonance was launched by the Gtouprmrny Amprtr in Zurich. The journal is produced by a small publisher in Göttingen, Germany, that has gathered experience with a palette of journals run by the (EGU). The initial idea of Magnetic Resonance was to create a socalled “gold” open access journal: one can freely download all papers, including preliminary and revised versions, reviewers’ critiques and authors’ replies, while the authors’ institutions pay reasonable Article Processing Charges (APCs). The new journal is independent of learned societies like the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the American Chemical Society (ACS), and it is not exposed to profit-oriented business models of commercial publishers like RLX/ Elsevier, Springer/ Nature, Cell Press, and Wiley. After about 2 years, it seems appropriate to publish a few remarks about our experience of the strengths and weaknesses of open access publishing. Our discussion draws on a detailed analysis of the Ethics Committee of the French CNRS, and on a debate organized by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science.