A Good Idea, But ...

While scientists like reading open-access journals, the EU-funded Study of Open Access Publishing found that researchers are less likely to submit their papers to those journals, reports ScienceInsider. The study surveyed 50,000 scientists, finding that 89 percent of the respondents supported the idea of open-access journals but that 53 percent had at least one paper in an open-access journal. In addition, the study reported two stumbling blocks to why researchers don't submit their work to open-access journals: author fees and a lack of high-quality open-access journals in their field. "Journal quality and impact factor is most important — not [open access] — when deciding where to submit," says Peter Strickland at the International Union of Crystallography, which is the publisher of the open-access Structure Reports Online as well as subscription journals.