WASHINGTON -- If the open access movement can’t replace the traditional publishing model of scholarly journals, what problem is the effort trying to solve? 

Participants during a session titled “Open Access and Publishing in History and the Social Sciences: Opportunities and Challenges” at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting clashed over that question Friday afternoon as they debated the role of open access journals in promoting scholarly research.

Journal subscriptions have traditionally funded the dissemination of research, but supporters of the open-access movement have experimented with shifting the costs elsewhere. One model, gold open access, requires articles to be made available free online when they are published in print, and the author pays a processing fee -- often about $2,000 -- to offset the costs. Another model, green open access, makes a rough copy of a published article available through a public repository. Some universities have also adopted policies that require faculty members to make their published research publicly available....