IMO - I'm the person who's done the work, they should be paying ME

AND I should get ....erm......£1million for every citation :-x :-x:-x:-x:-x:-x

'Particularly, my problem is that, unlike other open projects, it is being done by a for-profit company that utilises a revenue scheme that fundamentally changes who the customer of the publisher is - the author, instead of the readers, becomes the audience who must be satisfied by the journal.'

How do you arrive at this conclusion, Slizor? Take Nature. Everybody (well, scientists) wants to get an article in Nature because they perceive it to be the best journal - and that's why they get offered all the best research and turn over 75% of it away. So, one of the customers of the publisher in this case is the author. It's probably different in humanities, but when I publish an article, I look at the most 'suitable' journal and I then approach them. So, effectively, I have to be satisfied by the journal. Of course, the journal could then say, sorry, it's not for our readers. But then, so could an open-access journal. There's no shortage of research studies trying to find a home, as evidenced by the burgeoning number of journals online.
Did you know that subscription-only academic publishing is proportionately more profitable than Microsoft? That the better the access a university has to subscription only journals, the more successful research proposals they end up with? It's hardly fair. I'm waxing lyrical now, but if Open Access is doing anything, it's helping to create a more level playing field for universities. Just because someone goes to a former polytechnic or a poorer university shouldn't mean that they end up with restricted access to journals, having to spend money for photocopies from the British Library every time they want an article. :-)

I'm shocked, nay stunned, at the fact that you have to pay to be published - ironically i've been tidying up my first potential publication today and am ( was :-) ) positively excited.
Great question Anna, certainly got the conversation going

What sort of money are we talking about ? or does it depends on journal ? and dare i mention their rankings :-)

Really interesting to see such a 'cultural'/discipline divide on this issue. I'm based in medical science/biostats and a lot of people in these fields consider the general principles of open access publishing to be a really really good thing. Here are some of my thoughts/experiences:

- Lack of journal access is not just limited to former polys. I've just finished an MSc at a small, very specialist institution which most people outside the field have never heard of but EVERYONE around the world working in this field knows of and considers to be one of, if not THE, best institutions for that kind of thing. Yet library budgets were finite and journal access was pretty poor compared to the heavyweight multi-faculty university I was at before. Open access has been a boon for me this year.
- A lot of my fellow students will be going off to do work in low and middle income countries where research is poorly funded. If they don't have access to the research that enables them to produce good quality research/policy in their own countries, that's a reinforcement of the baseline inequalities some of them are trying to tackle.
- A lot of funders (e.g. Cancer Research, and I think Wellcome) require publication in Open Access journals on the grounds that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible. There was a bit of a dodgy phase of transition when it was unclear how this would work financially, but I think you can now write publication costs into grant applications.
- Subscription journals can be quite prone to 'publication bias' - they need to sell themselves so sometimes there is a preference for the headline-grabbing, paradigm shifting work, meaning that good quality but less revolutionary work gets overlooked. In clinical medicine, having access to as much of the data as possible, even negative results, is really really important for making informed clinical and policy decisions. Open Access journals such as PlosMed will publish anything that is good quality peer reviewed research, regardless of editorial agendas.
- On a technical point, because there's no concern about printing costs as it's all online, Open Access journals often don't impose a word limit or a max number of publications per month, which is useful!
- Following on from that, it's arguable that in some fields the rapidity of growth and amount of research coming out means that even if every good quality paper was accepted, existing print journals wouldn't be able to cope with the throughput, leading to the necessity for more journals, more subscriptions etc.
- Impact factors change over time. A paper I contributed to was published in PlosMed. Admittedly we did try a couple of subscription based higher impact journals first, but when they turned it down (not because of the quality of the research) we went to PlosMed as it was regarded as a better journal than some of the print ones which would have cost us nothing.

I can see that it's a model that won't necessarily translate well to arts/humanities where a lot of work comes from independent researchers who couldn't foot the bill (and it remains to be seen whether journals in those fields would adapt to accommodate this). But with some fields there's almost an ethical issue with not having stuff freely accessible to all, and I would say that this was particularly the case in medical sciences.

i was searching for publishing my article online. Found that most free journal has procedures that is long and ask for more of literature than the analysis in the article. Lots are very costly that cannot be afforded. In real life we can prove something as correct or wrong based on our past experience and not with other's past experience so Literature need not been given that importance is explained to me when i submitted an article with Saru Publications ( www.sarupub.org ) this made me understand the need to focus of my research largely. I share my experience with a good journal publisher who also has fee waiver option for good work and needy.