Here at the Open Knowledge Foundation we think that open access is great. It’s cost-free to readers, and thus knowledge can be read, shared and re-used across the world without impediment.
But publishing itself isn’t cost free, and the costs of publishing must be supported somehow. The fear of expensive charges sometimes discourages academics from attempting to publish in OA journals. Indeed some traditional publishers charge huge fees to make an article open access e.g. the $5000 that Cell Press journals (Elsevier) charge.

Open access journal publishing doesn’t have to be this expensive though. To encourage economists to publish in Open Access journals, the IZA – Institute for the Study of Labor are kindly covering the cost of OA publishing for articles submitted to the 5 journals in the IZA Journal Series published by SpringerOpen. The only additional requirement stated is a reasonable one: “Authors are expected to actively support the IZA journals by refereeing a certain number of articles.”

The IZA open access journals

The requirement to review other articles in-turn is not unique to these journals. In STM publishing, an exciting new Open Access journal called PeerJ is also using this requirement to keep costs down. Arranging peer review is often cited as an expensive component of journal publishing, thus by requiring a pool of authors to provide reviews (if they are appropriate reviewers) it should help minimize overall costs to the publishing company.

PeerJ – a new science journal that’s touted for big things this year. Just $99 for OA publishing services

There are of course other excellent open access journal publishing options in economics available and some of these are reviewed here. We support all quality open access journal publishers and repositories.

The official announcement about this by Klaus F. Zimmermann, Editor-in-Chief of the IZA Journal Series is available here.