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Talk to your Librarian; preferably a college one. I did. She was quite opinionated about the established journals and how they steal from her budget for doing nothing. Faculty are not too pleased about the money they must spend to be rejected on papers they often are not all that interested in but are required to write (while some wish all they did is write papers... I don't see why we need to manage them with a one-size-fits-all approach, that is so typical of management it baffles the mind that our smartest people are handled by such simpletons.)

I don't have my notes with me; I believe one site she mentioned was: http://www.doaj.org/

They are working to get these open journals on the university's portal. I would guess that many Librarians are doing similar things.

This is not about getting rid of the stamp of being published in a peer reviewed journal; it's about making sure MIT has a copy of the peer reviewed papers stored in its own Institutional Repository.

Some journals allow this (check out a list at http://www.doaj.org/). Many, especially the more established high ranking journals owned by large publishing operations, don't for fear of losing expensive subscriptions from libraries. Libraries have seen huge increases in the cost of journals as the publishers (who have seen the writing on the wall) seek to make money while they can.

This announcement along with the similar decisions by several funding bodies is all about forcing the publishers to change business model and accept papers without exclusive copyright transfer (or face not being able to publish papers from MIT, or research supported by the Welcome, NIH, etc.). If enough others join in then the fraction of research output covered will be too high for closed access journals to do without.

Models to fund open journals usually involve some number of:

- don't produce a printed version, online only

- automate as much of the peer review co-ordination process as possible to keep costs low (peer review and editorial boards are generally unpaid even at traditional journals)

- charge costs to the submitter (usually only charge those at established institutions in developed countries so submissions from less traditional routes are not blocked). Note many closed-access journal also charge, sometimes for bizarre things like a colour figure charge even for online-only material.

- rely on more volunteer effort in running managing the journal

The first place I go when looking for a new subject is Wikipedia. It usually gives you some background - just hold your nose if it is an even remotely controversial subject. Reading the "wrong viewpoint" won't hurt you :)

The next thing that I'll typically do is look down at the references in the Wikipedia article and use those for my next step. But at some point you have to step back and do your own research as a sanity check.

Again, it depends on the subject.

Oh, and there is a Directory of Open Access Journals for more heavy research. And Peter Suber runs a blog concerned with opening up peer-reviewed research.

Another junior academic here.

I feel like the original submitter question slightly confuses the issues of "paper vs. online", "pay access vs. open access" and "journal vs. something else." The fact is that the "paper vs. online" question is already nearly completely settled: journals have shifted aggressively over the last decade towards being online. Many of them still release paper versions--but nearly all academics access journals online nowadays. The business model has shifted from selling print subscriptions to libraries, to selling online subscriptions to institutions. Any decent journal nowadays is online, and searcheable both from the journal site and due to integration with other search services (e.g. Web of Science).

Journals are adapting, and online systems have helped them streamline their operations. "Two or more years" is no longer the norm. Good journals (with online submission) turn around papers in a few months. The paper is usually available online as soon as it has been accepted and typeset--so the publication is available to anyone interested long before the delayed dead-tree copy is shipped. Also, preprint servers (arXiv being the most famous) help academics get their results out quickly, while still publishing things in more official/traditional sources.

With respect to the "pay access vs. open access" question--this is a more difficult thing to change. Journals are very accustomed to their ability to charge for the spread of information. Many academics (myself included) consider this unfair (as they seem to do very little, relying on volunteer reviewers, and requiring authors to do quite a lot of editing and formatting themselves), and even detrimental to the free spread of information that is crucial to science. Despite the inertia of the entrenched players, things are changing. For instance, the Public Library of Science journals are all open-access, and are doing quite well at attracting high-profile science. The list of open access journals is growing all the time. The pressure has even induced many traditional journals to sponsor preprint servers (e.g. Nature Precedings), or to give authors the option of making their contribution open-access (usually through a page charge).

With respect to the "journal vs. something else" question... it's unclear why we should switch away from journals if they suit our needs. The current journal process (rigorous publication requirements, peer review, editorial oversight) is very important to modern science. It helps maintain the rigor and transparency, while reducing fraud and sub-standard work.

All of that to say that I'm a little confused by the initial submission. The situation is changing. Nearly everything is online. Open access is gaining traction. Modern journals bear little resemblance to the printed versions of a few decades ago... so the suggestion that they are "obsolete" somewhat misses the mark.

Suber's overview of the scene (there's an rss feed somewhere in there too)
- another blog
Alliance for Taxpayer Access
Directory of Open Access Journals
Directory of Open Access Repositories
The "Open Knowledge" Definition
And Wikipedia has lots of text on the subject.

In the world of computer science, statistics, and related areas, many of us have put our volunteer effort where our ideology is and actually do run top journals in the field, completely for free. Some generous assistance is provided by sponsoring institutions in most cases, which isn't hard to get if you just ask, as many institutions are keen to get their name associated with a journal.

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
etc.

In fact, you can just take a look at this directory and scan for the entries that say "Publication fee: no"---hundreds of them.

I think the usage in question certainly falls under 'fair use.' It certainly fits into the norms in the scientific community. Even though the journals are part owners (or sometimes full owners) of the copyright of papers, it's very normal for scientists to email each other PDFs, post copies on their websites, reproduce graphs in presentations, and so on. This is not only considered "fair" but very much considered "necessary" to maintaining healthy progress in science.

Yet despite the fact that these allegations have little merit (ethical or even legal), they create a very real chilling effect that slows science and decreases the distribution of information. Add to that the fact that most of this published research is funded by tax-dollars through government grants, and it becomes positively infuriating that the very scientists who do all the work are not allowed to freely disseminate the results of that work to the people, who pay for it.

This is why we all need to support the push towards Open Access in scientific publishing. If you are a librarian, student, postdoc, academic or industrial scientist, you should be putting pressure on journals to open their content to the people who do the work and foot the bill. For instance, consider publishing in an open access journal (see list here), or at least sign the petitions (US or Europe). Also see a discussion here which lists a bunch of things (small and large) that you can do to promote open access.

A listing of open online science newspapers : Directory of Open Access Journals

Here is a directory of open access journals. One of the requirements for inclusion is "Quality control: for a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system."

However, they keep the copyright.

Are you saying that you get to keep the copyright when you pay the page charges and provide these other services?

My understanding is that most grants and/or employers cover any expenses you have in publishing. Are you working on your own without grants or employer?

You might want to consider one of the open access on-line journals. http://www.doaj.org/

The reason right now is that nobody would pay any attention to such a publication.

I'm confident that this will change. Scientists, as a group, are generally doing science for the love of it, to better society, etc. (they usually are not doing it for the money, that's for sure!). Thus, as a group they are remarkably interested in "doing the right thing." Hence the ongoing debate in the scientific community, with more and more scientists putting support behind the notion of open access. As more open access journals are created, and gain reputation, I think the status quo will change.

As I describe in another post, the highly recognized American Institute of Physics is experimenting with allowing authors to cover the administrative costs, thereby making the publication open-access. Also, the journals from the Public Library of Science are making significant strides towards becoming high-quality yet totally open access. This directory lists nearly 2000 open access journals online. Granted the quality is highly variable. Some are great, some are not. We'll see how they work out.

A noble sentiment, however there is no mechanism available that provides for making this material available for free yet also allows for the funding of the needs of scientific article publication. There are some pilot programs in place, but at least so far they are not proven to work. Until this evolves to a trustworthy process the traditional methods will have to continue.

There are many mechanisms that are being debated. Obviously there will be growing pains, and obviously the most important thing is for these new open-access journals to gain a decent reputation... and/or for established journals to start experimenting. Luckily both of these things are happening. Thus, the future is bright for open access in academia (in my opinion, at least).

Hear hear!

Hopefully this is the beginning of reinventing the openness and availability of scientific knowledge and discourse.

What I really want to see is "transparent peer review" (a part of F/OSS methology these Open Access journals haven't implemented so far afaik). By that I mean that journals are willing to stick their neck out and publish the reviews they do in preparation for accepting or declining papers/articles (just like internal arguments in F/OSS projects can often be vieved by visiting the dev's mailing list/forum etc.). This would not only be a quality assurance measure but also educational on its own. It doesn't need to be long nor on the front page but it should be somewhere.

For those interested there are a lot of other open journals as well to be found at http://www.doaj.org/

For biology, this arcane system is a leftover from the early 70's when this was the only way to make money on biological research (Genentech, the first biotech was founded in '76). Only journals (and a few suppliers) used to earn money on biology research.

It is interesting to note that taxpayers pay for (most) research which is then published in journals. The journals then retain the copyrights to the research. As someone else pointed out, publishing in JBC costs $2000 (I can verify this personally). The best part is, the NIH paid me to do research, and then paid again for someone else to take the copyright to this taxpayer-funded research. Amazing!

There has already been an initiative from the NIH that NIH-supported research be freely accessible after 6 months.

For a directory of Open Access journals go to: http://www.doaj.org/

• Circular reasoning: see Reasoning, circular. Let me know when you're done looking up the definition (and finding those peer reviewers).

• X = Process of finding a subset A of scientists who can be independent peer-reviewers for a paper P co-authored by a subset B of scientists such that
  A has null intersection with B and the members of A are considered to be independent of the members of B.

• Y = Process of using a subset C of scientists, where C has null intersection with B, to reach a consensus decision about the members of A.

• Note that the editors are not supposed to have particularly notable skills in the subject the journal covers. Criticizing editors for not being biologists is idiotic.

• They do, however, have skills in editing and publishing -- which, oddly enough, most academics lack.

• Almost everyone is a specialist. Only the supremely arrogant assume their particular speciality is the only one that makes the world go 'round and everyone else is just a disposable, replaceable peasant.

The peer reviewers aren't paid under the current system and there is no reason to start paying them since it is an academic priviledge.

The old system of publishing is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

Check out the Directory of Open Access Journals for the the new publishers. http://www.doaj.org/articles/about

IEEE, has already gone "Green" -- i.e., it is among the 78% of publishers (publishing 92% of the 8950 journals surveyed to date) who have already given each of their authors the green light to provide open access to their own articles, if they wish, by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA archives. IEEE is now contemplating also going "Gold" -- i.e., becoming one of the 5% of publishers that are open-access publishers, making all of their articles open-access (and many of them recovering their costs by charging the author-institutions for publication by the article instead of charging the user-institutions for access by the journal or article). Going Gold is not without an element of risk, so IEEE are to be highly commended if they actually decide to try it, but let us not foget that, being already green, IEEE are already on the side of the angels! It is the authors (and their institutions and funders) -- i.e., the research community itself, the very ones for whom the benefits of open access are being sought -- who are to blame for not yet going when the going is Green, by self-archiving their own articles so as to make them open access. Relief may be on the way there too, however, in the form of a proposed new recommendation to the 55 major research institutions worldwide who have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access" that they should now implement an explicit Institutional Self-archiving Policy of providing open access to their own research article output. (A summary will appear in the March issue of D-lib magazine.) Two recent international surveys have found that whereas most authors do not yet self-archive, 79% will do so willingly, but only if and when they are required to do so by their employers and/or funders.

You might want to check out http://www.doaj.org/ (Directory of open access journals)

Fortunately, though, in physics there is the network of prepring/eprint servers where many papers go prior to publication. (See Arxiv.org, for example.) However, they have the disadvantage of not having been peer-reviewed yet. I would like to see a respected, true Open Access journal in physics. There are many "free" physics journals available (see Directory of Open Access Journals), but none fit my desire for a respected, peer-reviewed, open access journal.

Everyone here is aware, I'm sure, that there is really no such thing as "free" in publishing. Many people and hundreds of institutions are contributing their time, resources and money trying to break the stranglehold of the entrenched publishing industry.

The only way open access can ever really succeed is if authors choose to publish in these journals instead of the established journals. When careers and prestige are on the line, how many faculty and researchers will choose to publish their latest medical discovery in one of these free journals instead of established journals like "New England Journal of Medicine" and "Science"?

As all of the SPARC institutions know, creating the journals is just the first step in a very long and difficult struggle. Read them, publish in them, promote them to others. And thank your librarians for providing the seedbed for all these open access journals to flourish.