Springer recently announced that authors publishing in any Springer journal (including former Kluwer journals) will have the option of making their work available for free on the Springerlink web site, in exchange for a one-time publishing charge of $3000 per paper. Springerlink will contain a mix of pay-to-read and paid-to-publish papers. Even better,subscription costs will be reduced according to the fraction of pay-to-read papers.
That is, assuming anyone has $3000 lying around whenever they want to publish sometthing. I'm just cynical enough to believe that Springer has deliberately set the open-publication price just out of reach of most authors, at least in mathematics and computer science, in an effort to derail the open-access movement. Five years from now, when only a small fraction of authors have paid their hefty fee, Springer could easily argue "See? Authors don't really want open access! It was just a tiny handful of rabble-rousers all along."
Fortunately, Springer says elsewhere on its site:
If free publication, supporting a pressure-free editorial process, and free online availability are important to you, then you need only submit your article to any Springer journal. Springer’s ‘green’ self-archiving policy lets authors post their own versions of their accepted article on an institution’s public server, and subscription-based publication ensures that authors all over the world have equal opportunity at publication and a peer review process free from commercial pressure.
So if we want the world to have free access to our Springer-published papers, all we have to do is put them on the web, with Springer's blessing. So as an author, what's my incentive to pay Springer $3000? Every one of the benefits of Springerlink are already available really for free through Google, CiteSeer, the Los Alamos Cornell ArXiv, and authors' web pages.
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