Eye-catching item, “Creative destruction in the library” about open-access publishing in academia in The Economist of July 1-7, 2006 here.

Way down in the story is a discussion of Public Library of Science, “flagship of the open access movement.” I’ve been a fan of PLoS. Academics on salary write scientific articles; we get access to them free. Lots of good science, mostly pretty technical but not always, is in there. I’ve cited it myself.

But guess what, publishing costs money, even when it’s paperless, online, and without rights payments. PLoS contrived to lose $1m doing everything for free last year. How are they coping?

Well, they are raising the fee they charge an author to be published in PLoS from $1500 to maybe $2500 per article.

Freelance creators won’t rush to hold tagdays for their university brethren over this. But the old rule clearly holds. When you hear talk of creative work being “free,” the largest subsidy is always coming from the creators themselves.

It is sad that the United States, which has done so much to innovate in online publication, is also the state in which collective licensing is weakest. Clearly PLoS’s solution is a collective licensing one. Universities, research agencies, and other institutions which make use of PLoS’s rich holdings should be licensed to do so and should be paying negotiated fees to do so. Those who provide the value get recompensed; those who benefit from it pay appropriately to support the whole worthwhile enterprise.

But probably the Ford Foundation or someone will come up with a subsidy and the illusion that online publishing is costless and copyright merely a nuisance will be preserved a while yet.