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Unfortunately 300 year hundred years ago, there was neither online publishing, nor the scientific journals, the only way anyone could publish his/her research achievements and inventions was through the letters. The first issues of Nature was published in 1869 and it is significant that in 2009 the same journal is available through online publishing. But this luxury to disseminate scholarly papers does not come for free, there is always associate cost of making the research available. Traditionally this cost was paid by libraries as part of subscription model but emergence of open access journals can be seen as a way for libraries to move the cost of disseminating from the libraries budget to the researcher’s budget. That is nothing but serialization of the crisis, and journal like PLoS charge anything around $2200 to $3000. Although PLoS claims that

We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to author payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.

but actually it is not clear if waiver really benefited anyone, Open access journals have never revealed about the charity they offered as complete or partial fee waiver. Open access may be one of the solution but not only solution as it’s outrageous advocates claim. How can you justify the fact that in developing countries like India where salary/scholarship of a PhD student is less than 3000$ a year, and researcher will pay 3000$ for open access publication. Countries those are dreaming about 100$ laptops can not afford this lollipop, for them 15$s 2008 Science Blogging Anthology is nightmare. And if some day these open journals decided to shift their operation to offshore location such as India (very much like IT companies) to bring down the open access publishing cost, then I don’t know what will happen to our online discussion experts. Well that is one of the possibility, that open access may be ruled from third world countries and nothing wrong in that, if they can not afford to publish in PLoS then why the hell they can not start a cheaper but equally good version of open access. Take example of Bioinformation journal, a open access journal indexed in Pubmed and Pubmed Central is operated from India charges only 100$ as open access fees- even that is optional. I will also argue that open access journal may succeed in establishing themselves as alternative model but there will be never a Nature or Science from open access model unless Nature and Science themselves adopt some hybrid model. The reason is very clear, in open access model there is no restriction on number of article published and limitless supply of scholarly papers with variable quality waiting to be published make it more worst. This debate is endless but there is no doubt that open access is going to stay here, does not matter whatever be the quality.