Rosie Redfield's Open Access Saga ...

Rosie Redfield has an agonizing and interesting series on her blog about her attempts to pay for an article of her's coming out in the Journal of Molecular Biology to be "Open Access" under the Elsevier OA option (note - this is not fully OA, but it is better than the standard option for this journal). Here are some of her postings worth looking at:

• Open Access and other sliminess at Elsevier
• More Elsevier hassles about open access
• The saga continues...
• Open access frustration more powerful than princip...
• More from Elsevier (names removed...)

Rosie is one of the true pioneer's of Open Science, as she has turned her blog into a form of open notebook where she posts discussions about her current research, her papers in progress, grant proposals, and other ideas. Yet the process of trying to pay Elsevier to make her article somewhat more open, and the confusing way "Open Access" is presented by this journal has caused Rosie to (1) give up on the open option for this article and (2) become possibly more enamored with journals that are a bit more committed to Open Access from the beginning.

In her latest post she says

"The Elsevier sponsored-access system is confusing, the policy is not clearly explained, and the necessary information is hard to find.

The Journal of Molecular Biology is an excellent journal, and we're proud to have our article appear there. The submission and review process went very smoothly, the copy editing was very professionally done, and the 50 free offprints are a nice treat. But I feel strongly that taxpayer-supported research should be published where the taxpayers can see it, so I won't be submitting to any Elsevier journals in the future."