Free Scientific Journals

RichiH writes "Most of you have probably heard that science journals are getting more and more expensive. In hard numbers, 215% increase in price over the last fifteen years. What proves a major problem for libraries and interested individuals is great for the publishers. Reed Elsevier, with about 1700 scientific magazines the leading publisher, had a profit margin of 33.8% in 2003. With most research which is published, the taxpayers get the bill while the publishers get the money. So now for the good news: People are starting to fight this. Creative Commons is a good way, for example. Additionally, there are several magazines available which are based on a author-pays basis. If this sounds like a strange idea, think again. If Cell prints an article by you, you are charged $1000 for the first and $250 for each additional graphic you include. And this is for a reader-pays magazine! With PLoS Biology, the author pays $1500 for the whole article and the reader gets the magazine for free on the internet. Biomed Central lists 100 free magazines while the Directory of Open Access Journals lists an amazing 1425. I for one considered getting the $160 a year print subscription of PLoS just Because."

Comments

Peer Review

[the darn]

The free flow of information is all well and good, but the important service provided by most print journals is that they subject submissions to (supposedly) rigorous peer review. IANAS, but I imagine that such review might take some $ to accomplish. Will a researcher-pays system be inclined to look as closely at the articles submitted by its primary cash source?

Re:Peer Review

[Dr. GeneMachine]

So the distribution of manuscripts to reviewers is worth a >30% margin? FYI, the reviewers themselves are not paid by regular journals and will not be paid by free journals. So the standard of peer review can be maintained without a problem. Additionally, it is not uncommon for regular journals that the authors have to pay for the publication of their articles. The $1500 for PLoS is well in the normal price range for article publication.

I consider this a good development. The business model for scientific publishers is deeply flawed. Consider: The public pays for research done at a university. The public pays for the publication of this article in a scientific journal. And then - the public pays again a ridiculously high price, so that the universities can subscribe to this journals. This simply ain't right. To complete the sad story, even the copyright of the article does not stay with the researcher who published it, but is transferred to the publisher.

Re:Peer Review

[zangdesign]

The only problem is that the public is still paying to publish the article. I seriously doubt that scientists are coughing up their own moolah for this.

It seems to me the best solution is the one where the scientific journal is paying the researcher, much as any other magazine would pay a journalist.

Re:Peer Review

[the eric conspiracy]

It seems to me the best solution is the one where the scientific journal is paying the researcher

I would suspect that this would just result in an increase of the cost of the journal. It's just a shell game hiding the cost of the publication of these journals.

Scientific journals are a funny business. The circulations of the journals is very small, but the information in them can be very important in the long run. Clearly there is an external economy not accounted for in the direct economics. When that occurs the usual solution is to go outside the traditional economic models and get some sort of government regulatory involvement. That seems to be happening in an indirect manner now, with a distortion in the whole process of excess profits to the publisher. Some people are trying to do an end run around the existing process, but the very important tradition of peer review is threatened by this.

It is not going to be easy to come up with alternative to the current system.

Re:Peer Review

[Otter]

It seems to me the best solution is the one where the scientific journal is paying the researcher, much as any other magazine would pay a journalist.

Yeah, but somebody has to pay for the operation! A journal can charge authors, charge for online access, charge for paper copies, or all of the above. You can't simultaneously eliminate or slash all of those things!

Seems to be working

[Otter]

The real barrier to entry is name recognition. A new journal can offer the best services and product out there, but if it doesn't command respect, scientists will take their work elsewhere.

I was skeptical about this new crop of journals, but PLoS seems to be taking off pretty nicely -- I've seen some decent stuff in there. The key seems to be having a critical mass of major players on the board, to command respect and to stock the first year with decent material. (Of course, that means using grad students and postdocs as cannon fodder on yet another front, but, hey, they had their chance to go to law school instead.)

FYI, journals are never, ever referred to as "magazines".

Re:Seems to be working

[chihiro]

Name recognotion is crucial, which is why PLoS Biology stands a good chance. It has had a pretty high profile in the Biosciences. A number of well respected scientists were instrumental in starting PLoS up, and the editor was poached from a big journal (Nature I think, but I may have misremembered).

The papers I've seen it PLoS Bio so far have been pretty good. Not as 'high profile' as Nature but solid work, and with papers long enough to avoid the 'tabloid' tendency that Nature sometimes has (short papers, exciting results, very little detail)

All power to PLoS, lets hope the other PLoS journals also meet with success.