This team of researchers found that if a journal was published in an open source journal vs. a subscription based journal it was going to result in an increase in use of only about 10%. Funnily enough, this study was published in Science, a subscription based journal that I don't subscribe to so I couldn't read the entire article. Anyway, I find this pretty easy to believe as good open source journals like PLOS have only been around for a few years whereas all these fee-based journals have been entrenched in the scientific community for about a hundred years. I know I pay about $200 per year for a subscription to one particular journal and would go broke if my company didn’t pay for access to other journals in my field. I understand the need to recoup the costs of publishing a journal, but the time will come when print based journals are no longer around and, hopefully, prices will come down or they might even be free like PLOS.
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