Collaborative publishing: the difference between ‘gratis journals’ and ‘open access journals’

* " An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the worldwide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds ". That is the beginning paragraph of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, known as the Budapest Declaration. 1 Most likely, no one associated with science, research, or scientific knowledge would be against these statements; 'public good' or 'for the sake of inquiry and knowledge' are altruistic terms that fit perfectly with the research environment. Unfortunately, in some of the subsequent lines, a not-so-encouraging sentence appears: " While the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce ". This declaration gave birth to a new type of journal, the open access journals, with a business model based on the statement, " These new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses ". 1 Both types of journals, subscription journals and open access journals, have been advocating their excellence and the benefits of their publication systems. One of the BMC journals demonstrated that open access journals were approaching Impact Factors similar to subscription journals. 2 More recently, a suspiciously simultaneous series of editorials in nursing subscription journals explained the risks associated with publishing in open access journals. 3-8 However, a third option exists. Major subscription journal publishers are now entering the open access market by creating fully open access journals and hybrid open access journals. 9 The latter consist of providing access to some of the articles published in a subscription journal after receiving compensation from the authors. To categorize all these options, several different terms were created, such as 'gold open access'; 'green open access'; or green, blue, yellow and white archiving policies. 10 This categorization is most likely too complex for a non-specialist. However, 'open access' does not mean 'free'. It costs money. 11 Obviously, open access publishers promote creating institutional funds to support publishing fees in these journals and thereby avoid burdening research …