Why is Portland Press introducing Opt2Pay?
Portland Press has undertaken this experiment with authors pre-paying for access for a number of reasons. First, we wish to discover whether author pre-payment for access (sometimes called open access) is financially sustainable for authors and institutions in the long term. Secondly, we wish to collect hard evidence on which to base our future decisions on whether such pre-payments are a viable alternative business model to the reader-pays (subscription) model that has traditionally supported the peer-review system, which underpins scholarly publishing. Thirdly, we wish to discover whether freely available articles achieve greater citations and impact and, last, but not least, we wish to experiment in a responsible manner, so that that the journals we publish do not sustain any irreversible damage to their quality or financial viability. Portland Press is the wholly owned publishing subsidiary of the Biochemical Society. Its annual surplus, ‘the science dividend’, is given in its enti
