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Victory Cabal is as good as the PR man the publishers hired. He is either misleading the readers or he is ignorant of how open access journals function. All scientific journals - open access or toll access - do have a refereeing system in place. Refereeing has nothing to do with the business model followed by journals.
The open access movement is gaining momentum. Six of the eight research councils in the UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have mandated open access to research they fund. The European Union and the US Congress are considering legislation that would mandate open access for all publicly-funded research. And over 92% of about 9,000 journals surveyed allow open access archiving of papers published in them. More than half the open access journals do not charge an author-side fee for publishing a paper. Books in leading libraries are being digitised by several agencies. Even companies like Microsoft are supporting open access and open science.
It is therefore difficult to understand why the publishers association should have thought that it could stall the inevitable, hire a very expensive consultant who charged them such a hefty some to tell them to tell lies and earn such a bad name for all its members. New technology makes old ways obsolete. With the arrival of Gutenberg's printing technology all the monks lost their jobs as scribes. With the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web conventional publishers are no longer needed as intermediaries between scientists.
