"Open Access" at Cambridge University Press

[mike@miketaylor.org.uk (Mike Taylor)]

Just noticed this press-release at the Cambridge University Press
web-site:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displaySpecialPage?pageId=45

        Cambridge University Press Journals launch Open Access

        August 14th 2006, Cambridge, England, UK & New York, USA

        Cambridge Open Option

        From August 14th 2006 authors submitting articles to
        selected Cambridge Journals will be able to make their
        articles freely available to everyone, immediately on
        publication. Building on the success of Breast Cancer
        Online, the first Cambridge Open Access project, and
        Neuron Glia Biology, which provides Open Access after
        6-12 months, Cambridge Open Option introduces a new
        Open Access model to a further 15 journals from the
        Cambridge list.

        Gavin Swanson, STM Editor-in-Chief at Cambridge
        Journals said: "I've been involved in the Open Access
        world for some time and the launch of Cambridge Open
        Option is the result of a great deal of painstaking
        research into best practice. I'm confident that we
        have a robust model that will benefit both authors and
        researchers equally. We're hoping that this will
        become a major part of our journals publishing in the
        future and that it will help us give greater access to
        the results of scientific research reported in our
        journals."

Sounds good, right?  Wrong!  Check this out:

        All Cambridge asks in order to provide this service is
        that the author, or their institution or funding body,
        pays a fee to cover costs associated with the
        publication process, from peer-review of the submitted
        manuscript, through the copy-editing and typesetting,
        to online-hosting of the definitive version of the
        published article. The charge that will be applied for
        each article is £1500 / $2700.

So if you want the right to give your work away, you have to pay
Cambridge University Press £1500.  I don't think so!

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike@miketaylor.org.uk>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "When a man is tired of Ankh Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep
         slurry" -- Terry Pratchett, "Mort"