Slashdot Mirror
Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
An anonymous reader writes "Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren't happy, saying that it's unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers."
Isn't it interesting that the journals that are most open, have something to do with "Bio"? "Bio", the next big money maker, federal, and state alike.
I'm involved in creating a project similar to one of these at our college of Business and Information Systems at the university. It will be a knowledgebase of all of the projects undergraduates/graduates have completed while at the university. Has anyone done this already? How did you implement this? What was included, what was not?
It's unethical to accept money for publishing? As opposed to what, not being published at all?
If your knowledge isn't shared, what's the point of research? And if traditional academic journals won't publish your research because of a simple lack of space, why shouldn't you seek alternative outlets?
It seems to me that this is a wonderful thing. Persistent knowledge--that's the key to human intellectual evolution, and what makes us so much smarter than those other dumb monkeys. Anything that facilitates this process will only make us collectively smarter.
Generate one automagically here and see if it is accepted.
...which attracts this kind of people.
Dilemma not by accepting money from advertisers but demanding money from the same people that write and review their articles. And not just a little bit of money, bootloads of money.
"It seems to me that this is a wonderful thing. Persistent knowledge--that's the key to human intellectual evolution, and what makes us so much smarter than those other dumb monkeys. Anything that facilitates this process will only make us collectively smarter."
How can such a "smart" species, have such a "dumb" concept as war?
I never understood the economics of peer-reviewed scientific journals. The authors don't get any money and are usually tech-savvy enough to produce well-formatted papers. The peer-reviewers (at least when I peer reviewed) didn't get any money. And being an editor is an academic feather in your cap. So the cost of content and the cost of reviewing the content is close to zero. But some journals cost individuals and especially the institutions a large amount of money. In this day of electronic typesetting and distribution, does it make any sense?
Take the New England Journal of Medicine. It's about $150 for an individual subscription and ranges from $1000 to $17,000 for institutions depending on the size. This is for a publication that doesn't pay authors, and in fact can make authors bend over backwards. No wonder all sorts of publication models are being explored.
People just want more cash money, which is understandable, after all - we have to have some kind of incentive for research, development and innovation. Anyway, with BitTorrent and IRC, I don't think anyone can keep digital media private anyway.
The idea of paying for publication in journals is ethically questionable. But then, so is accepting money in return for advertising. And, in computer science at least, most publications first appear in peer-reviewed conferences in which attendance at the conference (generally very expensive) is a condition of publication. Which basically amounts to paying to have your work published.
The basic problem is, of course, that mixing money with the lofty ideals of purely merit-based peer-reviewed scientific publication will always lead to adulteration of the principle. Money is, after all, rarely given away without some sort of agenda (legitimate or otherwise).
But, until a better solution is implemented (I'm not holding my breath) I don't see paying to get your work published as being any more pernicious that the other models currently in place. Ultimately, the scientific community will judge these journals by the quality of the work they publish. Given this, it is in their interests to keep the quality high. Nobody wants to be published in some two-bit, poorly regarded journal.
how long until colleges are just "places people are learning" and no longer "monopolies of what people are learning", and the internet provides the subject matter?
//de ~ 9cimi
Maybe someone should read the "Journal of Economics"? It costs more because the audiance is very small. There's also more than just "shuffling of papers around" that journals do. "The peer-reviewers (at least when I peer reviewed) didn't get any money." In other words one individual in the whole process. Guess what? I'm the janitor here, and what I can tell you about running a business...Oh, boy!
"Traditional" academic journals actually get very little money from commercial advertising. Many specialized field journals have been using "pay for play" models well before the Internet came along. With these journals, such as the Journal of Immunology, each article usually bears the following disclaimer:
The cost of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
I have been through the manuscript submission process and you have to pay big bucks once your paper is accepted for publication: $200 per article if you have supplemental information (material that doesn't fit in the manuscript but still published), $70 per printed page, and $325 per color figure for printing a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article. If you want to allow your article on Open Access, you'll need to pony up another $750-$1000 dollars.
It's dumb to focus on the ethics when there is a more basic issue at stake. Writers who publish with vanity presses, for the most part, do not command the same respect and credibility as authors who publish with established journals and presses, unless the authors *already* have credibility.
The vanity-press (pay-to-publish) approach will simultaneously make journals *and* authors less credible. At the same time, it provides a way to silence new voices by providing an additional barrier to scientific publishing for graduate students and junior faculty.
Let me know when Phys. Rev. Letters. or Nature or other journals that everybody reads and really matter are free.
There are too many scientific journals out there, nobody can read them all.
Myself I am a theoretical physicist who is also interested in population genetics (about 70% of my papers are published in physics journals and 30% in genetics and mathematical biology journals). I follow regularly the following journals:
1) Phys Rev Letters
2) Phys Rev E
3) Journal of Mathematical Physics
4) Journal of Chemical Physics
5) Physica A (Elsevier)
6) Physics Letters A (Elsevier)
7) Journal of Mathematical Biology (Springer)
8) Mathematical Biosciences
9) Journal of Theoretical Biology
10)Theoretical Population Biology
11)Genetics
12)Science
13)Nature
None of these journals are free and probably never be. Thirteen journals is WAY TOO MUCH for me, I already spend a lot of time browsing and reading literature, I use 25-30% of my time for that, I need the rest of time for real research and direct interaction with other scientists.
Like anyone at slashdot knows anything about pubic access.
One of the problems that Wikipedia has is accessing information. To write a thorough entry, quite a bit of research must be done. If you don't go to a University that has paid for access, it's often impossible to research a particular field. With open journals, this would assist in writing thoroughly researched articles.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Academic repositories in the UK use the prefix xxx.place.ac.uk in the UK instead of www.place.ac.uk. Try explaining to your sysadmin why their internet filtering system is blocking you from viewing anything on it :D
Paying such money to publish your research? This is just outrageous. Why don't these people just set up online preprint archive, free of charge, available to anyone, like high-energy physicists did in the early '90. Now, 15 years later, this archive is practicaly the only "journal" that active high-energy physicists read. You should use taxpayers money for research and not for paying rediculous sums to some publishers, who will then disseminate your results far worse than a free web service.
Are those journals "must reads" because of the quality of the peer reviewers and editors? Or are they popular because of the glossy paper and the formatting? If the key ingredient is the intellectual manpower, and that manpower is voluntary, why the huge cost when the material can be posted in PDFs and printed locally on an article by article basis?
The advertising is, by far, not the biggest ethical problem, but that the articles remain copyright of the publisher and a traditional publisher typically will not give out copies of the article for free. So if you are not part of an institution that subscribes to the article, it can be quite costly for you to gain access to an article. Sure, you can find it on Google or Pubmed, but you cannot read it unless you pay.
This is not a good thing - if you don't have the money or are not part of an institution, you can't access information. And this just because the publisher wants to make a buck. Information should be free if the party who generated it wish so.
The problem that the open access journals face today is that of credibility. My boss doesn't want me to publish in an open access journal because that would not, in his opinion, be as good a credit for the group as would be publishing in a respected journal. It is not yet widely understood that easy access to an article correlates positively with publicity. When I do my reading, I do not care at all in which journal the article appeared. But the fact is that there are still people who do.
Often I think it would be nice for IEEE to grant free access to their archives. So many times I need to refer to a paper but have to wait until one of my Universities 15 seats opens up.
So it should be available for free/cheap. The money is there for quality assurance. Given the poor quality of many papers (including randomly generated ones), it is necessary to peer review papers. But other profs should be doing this in exchange for reviews of their own papers. So there is a tradeoff between quality of peer reviews and cost (just like most goods). But the work in the journels is generally paid for by public funds so it seems wrong to have to pay for these papers. In addition, there isn't much incentive to peer review papers because of the publish or perish rule of academia. Maybe there should be some kind of requirement that you must review three papers for each one you submit (so each paper is reviewed by three people). But I have a problem paying for something my tax dollar already paid for.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Well, you can still visit a public university and use their library even if you aren't part of the institution. Many private univerity librarys as well (though the access is usually inferior.)
"So it should be available for free/cheap."
Your "tax dollars" pay for some of the research out there. If you look carefully at some of the research projects out there, you'll see things like DARPA, and HP for example. So if you want to play "breakout games" with your "tax dollars" (try that with the road system). Then you'll get maybe a small page or two, and the rest goes to the "non-tax" portion, and now you're right back were you started.
Currently the vast majority of academic journals are controlled by a cartel of a few publishers, which thrive by charging very high prices to research libraries (thousands of dollars a year for subscriptions to a few hundred journal pages)--for example, Kluwer alone controls hundreds of journals. These same publishers enjoy the cooperation of the best scientists who edit and peer-review the journals without any compensation for their many hours of work.
Preeminent scientific journals are essentially brand names (think "Nike" or "Adidas") and other than marketing cache offer nothing to the scientific community.
The situation is unbearable especially in poorer countries where research libraries cannot afford the subscription prices to the best journals. My university is now in the process of difficult subscription cuts due to a lack of library budget.
All that is need for "open access" journals is the cooperation of the leaders of the scientific community for the benefit of all.
The inevitable replacement of current journals by "open-access" journals is the legacy of open source in general. It's very interesting to see the influence of open-source ideas in areas outside of software development.
The section that lists computer science related journals is very strong. There's 48 of them, as opposed to Construction (only 4), Chemical Tech (only 2) et cetera.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Nothing new here. Think Yahoo directory! You pay them to get your paper reviewed but this does not guarantee publishing. Some magazines might be more picky than others but that is also case with pay to read stuff.
My only problem with it is that people generally take articles published in journals to be at least partially authoratitive (as apposed to articles published in a tabloid). Now if the profit motive is the only criterion determining whether an article is published or not, then this will probably have a negative impact on people's perceptions of journals in general (with a lot of articles which didn't make make it through peer-review being published in journals which will publish you if you pay them).
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
In many fields (Astronomy, Physics, Math) it is standard practice for authors to pay page charges (often about $100 per page) to publish their articles. (Of course, in these fields most journals don't have any advertisements.) I see nothing unethical about it.
The obvious question is why should an author pay to print the article when they can post a pdf on their website or an online archive (such as arxiv.org). The answer is that scientists are judged (i.e., hired, tenured, promoted, etc.) based on their refereed publications. Posting the same things on your website will get you only a small fraction of the "credit". There are some exceptions (e.g., if you make a particularly important discovery), but from the scientist's point of view, why risk it? It's much safer to pay the ~$1000 page charges.
Personally, I wish that departments would recognize how much money could be saved if they were to stop using refereed publications as the primary criteria for judging their members.
I applaud the ideas behind setting up these journals, but until scientists really want to be published in them, when their impact factor increases, they won't be successful or well respected within the scientific community. For now, they're going to struggle against the perception that they are a poor quality sort of plan b that you turn to when your paper isn't accepted by more prestigious journals. (Impact factor is a complicated mathematical measurement used by science employers to measure how well their emplyees are doing. It works a bit like Googles page rank the overall score depends on how many other people cite your work in the references at the end of theirs. Obviously, the greater the visibility of the journal, the more people read and the more likely they are to cite it.) Ironically, if journals like PloS are to be a success they really need other scientists reading them, rather than the public.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Which one? On the one hand, you can share your knowledge for free and take the risk that someone else will claim your "knowledge", on the other you can share what you've discovered and people will call you a hypocrite. I'd take that Hobson's choice anytime.
The problem with other fields' journals, like CS, is that the algorithms introduced often don't have free implementations of their experiments and data. So, even if the article is free as in speech, the "science" isn't.
Page charges for scientific journals were invented by Americans (they believe EVERYTHING can and must be measured in money)
Scientific journals were invented in Europe at the end of 17th Century because the books were an inefficient means of disseminating new results (At the time there were no real American scientists). They were published by learned organizations such as the Prussian, French or Russian Academies or by the British Royal Society and later by big universities. They had a rigorous peer review system but did not charge anything and the authors were not paid either.
This is also partially true today. For example, the European Physical Society would not recognize any physics journal which charges any fee to the authors. For example Nuovo Cimento (Italian) although a good physics journal is not recognized by the European Physical Society because charges the authors.
In the US the situation is very different, Americans have an ULTRACAPITALISTIC VIEW of the World,and think that EVERYTHING MUST BE MEASURED IN MONEY. Page charges are the rule there for any serious scientific journal. Of course, the charges are paid from grants. If you are broke with no money or grants in many cases you can ask the journals to waive the publication costs; if you cannot pay they would delay the publication of your paper for a few months. Nobody expects a Russian physicist from Dubna to pay $2000 for publishing an article in Phys.Rev.
About arxiv. The articles posted there are not to be taken seriously until they are published in real, peer reviewed journals. Many papers posted there dont make it in a real peer reviewed journal,they are rejected and forgottern. The tradition of preprints started long before the Internet was widely used. In the late seventies, when I started my career as a theoretical physicist every big physics center (Cern, Dubna, SLAC, etc) distributed preprints on a regular basis, months before they were published in real journals. They were not posted on the Internet but photocopied on paper, each preprint was given a number by the organization who released it, it was possible to refer to them in other publications. Many of them were typed with a typewritter and had the equations handwritten and had very nice, colored covers. Back then computers were used for crunching numbers, not for desktop publishing, the typewriters and the photocopiers ruled. However, physics was about the same as today.
In the computer graphics and visualization community conferences actually are the preferred way of publication. After the paper has been accepted by the program comitee (based on the reviews), the paper is then presented at the conference. While this could be considered as "paying for publication" (since at least one of the authors has to attend) it has no influence on the quality of the published papers. As long as the reviewing standards are high enough, many people will attend the conference to see high-quality presentations and get in contact with the authors - this is the way the organizing institution can finance the whole thing.
Conferences such as ACM Siggraph or IEEE Visualization usually have a very low acceptance ratio - only the highest-quality papers are accepted. As soon as a conference is considered high-quality, researchers will be eager to get their paper published at this conference -> the number and quality of submitted papers will increase, the spiral goes upwards.
In summary, if you get the whole thing running this model will both cover costs and result in good publications.
One of the important things about research, though, is that you really need to cite where you get information from. (Proper research, anyway.)
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time I checked I don't believe that Wikipedia had any formal way to cite sources -- at least not one that anyone's seriously using if it's there. There are plenty of indirect and informal methods, such as the External Links sections that might sometimes indirectly imply that information was gathered from them, but this isn't proper or reliable citing.
I do use Wikipedia a lot and I've written several articles for it, but this is one thing I still think it seriously needs. Once it has a mechanism like this and it's straightforward to use, I'll feel much better about it.
From the PLoS FAQ:
What if I can't afford publication charges?
We realize that not everyone who does research can afford to pay publication charges through their grants. PLoS waives those fees, no questions asked, for anyone who can't pay. Our editors and peer reviewers have no knowledge of who can pay, so papers are accepted only on their merit. Authors may also qualify for discounts on publication charges via their institution or a funded program; see our institutional members page for more information.
Ok, now besides "brand Recognition" why would I want to pay someone $1500 to upload my work to a web page in the Internet?, why not only upload it to my home in the Uni and then publish it in places like Citeseer or even something like ACM's DL.
I think (like some others in this thread) its only a matter of brand recognition and commerce, but if you have a good paper about any subject AND it is on the Internet, it will surely be published.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
You are obviously not a scientist because you have no idea how scientific publishing works, at least in the US.
Best journals, with highest sientific standards, tough referees, are those charging publications costs. Why? They are published by non-profit organizations, and have no money. Usually the bigger the charges the better the reputation of the journal.
Commercial publishers usually dont charge the authors, they make money by selling the journals. However, they are less reputable than the non-commerial journals. For example, Annals of Physics (commercial, published by Academic Press) does charge but has a worse reputation than Physical Review (non profit) which charges a lot.
Not knowing how science publishing works, you apply economics and draw wrong conclusions which are not consistent with the facts. The odds of being rejected are higher for journals who charge, because they are non-commercial and have higher scientific standards. THEY ONLY CHARGE YOU AFTER THE PAPER WAS ACCEPTED, IF YOU ARE REJECTED YOU DONT PAY A DIME.
Regarding my own research, I always try to publish in non-commercial journals, with page charges, because they have a better reputation. I only send papers to commercial journals if they are not good enough for a non-commnercial journals.
I've been involved with an undergraduate journal at California State University, Monterey Bay for the past couple of years. Just this year we opted to go with an open source journal management system developed and supported by the Public Knowledge Project Open Journal Systems at the University of British Columbia. We're quite happy with it, both from a technical standpoint and the mission of the project. ePrints is another project working on similar issues.
Hopefully we will see more open access (without requiring payment from authors OR readers!) as libraries and other institutions start to use these great open source tools. It makes management and online publication/archiving really painless. There's even a distributed backup system in place and a group running archiving standards.
As a member of the American Anthropological Association I understand that the journals they publish are supported through subscriber costs which far outweigh the cost of publication. The remaining profit goes to funding the annual conference, administration costs for the association, etc. They have recently made all of the American Anthropologist journals available to members online, a pretty massive project I'm sure.
As all good active physicists know, nobody reads the real journals, everyone reads www.arxiv.org.he real journals, everyone reads www.arxiv.org.
If you wait for the preprints to appear in the real journals, your physics career will be tanked in no time...
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I lerned evarytin I no on the internets.
Joking apart, although the internet will change the economics of Universities (perhaps more will operate on the model of the Open University in the UK), there will always be a place for qualifications certified by respected authorities in a domain and vetted, well edited, material to go with it.
yes, that's why I've opened a gmail account "Persistent knowledge - the key to human intellectual evolution".
I now keep all my spam in carefully organised folders so that future generations can marvel at the ideas of these mass marketers.
One might find that too much information obfuscates the scientific process. I'm not completely pro peer review, but it has a good points as well as bad.
Maybe a directory of them goes some way to help.
Thanks for the insight. The only problem with slashdot however is that it's mostly wasted. Next time we get another story like this (it's not the first time, nor is your insight the first time either). We will (I guarentee it) get someone that will complain like the OP about academic journals, and ask "why isn't this the way I (big emphasis on I) want it?". Makes you wonder sometimes why we even bother answering questions around here?
I work for one of the largest scientific publishers, yup we have over 1000 academic journals, and as ever the story is not as simple as it might seem at first.
.
We are not simply robber barons that leech profit off the back of the honest hard working scientist. I think one ought to understand that we truly believe that we can offer services that are worth the costs, and that we help to increase the base value of scientific literature.
The publishing model that is currently in place has been around for a long time. I.e. where scientists submit for publication in a peer reviewed journal, the running costs of which are boune by a publishing house. In some cases this model has been around for over 150 years. Instant access via the internet is still a young technology in comparison. As publishers we know things are going to change redically, but naturally we take a conservative view. Free open source publishing is an attractive idea, but it has to generate revenue in order to cover maintencece costs. While the curret closed source system continues to generate revenue, since histroically this is the model we as publihsers know how to work with, it is a model that will stay around.
What is it that we can offer?
Well, the main thing is publishing of scientific content. Yes, for some people making their own servers and files is a snip, but most scientists are far too busy chasing funding money (which is where ultimatly most of the publication costs are coverd from), doing research, teaching classes. It simply does not make sense for scientists to be publihsers too. Their time is more valuable when spent doing science!
We offer secure archiving, back compatability (making pre-digital issues available to the community), we offer distribution, help with language conversion, we offer content in a form that allows people to data mine the papers.
The poeple I work with love science, I love talking to scientists about their work. Bringing a book into the world is kind of cool too. High costs are due to low unit sales, thats just the econimics of the thing.
The principle goal of a publisher is, of course, to turn a profit, but to do so whilst offering a service. We believe in what we do.
There are many many other issues to think about too, the low number of papers that get cited, data glut and the role a publisher can play in helping to provide meta-sorting/pre-screening. Quality control/peer review, etc, etc
Anyhoo, I got to get back to making books!
There are plenty of journal articles and articles from conferences and other sources available on the web. I just wrote a paper on text summarization using sources I only found through google.. Mainly because going through my school's journal databases is too much of a hassle.
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
Mod parent down!
"I work for one of the largest scientific publishers, yup we have over 1000 academic journals, and as ever the story is not as simple as it might seem at first."
:)
You must be new here?
"What is it that we can offer?"
Funny how "Division of labour" let alone "Economics of scale", as they relate to the concept "society" escapes most people around here.
You'd think we have all the time in the world, to be all things, and still bring home the bacon.
Thanks for the insight thought (for however long it lasts).
The traditional academic journals aren't happy, saying that it's unethical to accept money for publishing.
Many of the traditional specialist journals already charge authors for publishing papers in their journals. The big two - Nature and Science - don't do that but the more specialised journals like those for biochemistry do. So there's no difference here and their objections to payment to publish in the free journals are not valid
Mod child funny!
KFG
Where's the [Edit] button on this article?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Are you kidding?
At least in physics it is quite evident that some journals publish articles with much more impact, longevity and generality than some others. The history of the group/institution and the journal where the article is published are indeed indications of quality of the work. Is it fair? Maybe not, but life in general isn't fair.
Personally, I would not cite an article that has been published in an open access journal until they gain more respectability and history (primarily so that I can better judge how stringent their peer-review process is). Yep, it's a catch-22 situation for such journals, but then again it's not really authors' problem. You can always safely publish in the more traditional media.
The owls are not what they seem
Just to let you know: I really like your electronic submission/article tracking system. It's very nice that I can see uncorrected proofs of accepted articles, too.
The (cognitive) psychologicy and linguistic journals I know have the same system. The evaluation is done by unpaid reviewers, although sometimes one or two members of the board are scientists paid for their troubles. Suppose each of them gets a $50,000 salary. That makes around $150,000 (yes, that's more than two times 50k, but there are more costs involved in hiring somebody). If your journal reaches 150 university libraries, they'll have to contribute $1,000 each, and that's excluding printing, distribution and other editing costs. There might be more universities (if we assume there's one per 1 million inhabitants, there are around 800 of them in Europe and the USA; the rest won't be able to afford these journals...), but unless you've got the ultimate top-journal for every field, not all of them are going to subscribe to your journal. Looking at it in that way, $1000 no longer seems that expensive...
On the other hand, the grand-parent of this post shouldn't forget that Elsevier-Reed (most likely the publisher (s)he's working for) makes quite a profit...
Interesting. I just went and took a look at the editorial board, and who was publishing in an electronic journal, and decided that it looked reasonable. Perhaps physics is a much bigger field than the corner of math/CS I work in, and that kind of "web of trust" approach is not possible.
Of course, as other people have pointed out, whether I would get full career credit for publishing there is another question.
I'm a little surprised that the submitter mentioned academic journals accepting advertisements. I know some fairly "high-end" magazine like "Foreign Affairs" do, but I know that the journal "International Security" does not - never has, most likely never will. Is International Security unique in this?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Maybe it really varies by subject; Biology is a wierd one because there is so much money there.
CS, by its very nature, is so computer centric, and often there are the accompanying code, screenshots, demo programs and videos: the web is the natural way to distribute this stuff.
Even in CS, the ACM is not free to read, it is relatively low cost compared to the 'retail' publishers, who are still up to their old practises.
I am fortunate I recently had a paper turned down by one of the latter, because their journal rules explicitly stated "not to be published online". I have got it into an IEEE conference instead, and we will be hosting it for everyone to see.
And that, when you think about it, is what matters. The more people read your work, the more they may learn from it (or, for people playing academic politics, the more they may cite it).
I attended a seminar just yesterday presented by Allen Press on Open Access. Presentations were given by the EIC of PLoS Computational Biology, the director of the American Society for Cell Biology, the CTO of the Nature Publishing Group, as well as respresentatives from Google Scholar, CrossRef, the Association of Learned and Professional Society of Publishers, and people from various university libraries.
Overall, everyone agrees that the move to Open Access is a good idea and that information (especially scientific information) wants to and needs to be free. However, the primary concern still lies in resolving and adapting the publishing models that are employed. Several case studies were given of organizations who have moved to open access in the past several years. Their subscriptions have dropped a little over the past few years, but their page views and number of articles downloaded have skyrocketed. However, they admit that there isn't enough data to determine whether their current model has any long-term viability and sustainability. Interestingly, the keynote presented some data from several studies indicating that many of the fully open access journals out there tend to be more amateurish at this stage (far less peer-review, very high acceptance rate for submitted papers, very low/negligible impact factor/rank, less copyediting, etc), while mixed model or embargoed OA journals have retained their relevence in the scientific community.
And for those of you out there saying that there's little or nothing involved in the publishing of a scientific journal, you simply don't get it! I work for a medical publication that is run by 3 people (the exec dir/publisher, copy editor, and me, the editorial assistant). None of us are paid particularly well. However, our publication that gets out to 20,000 people still costs nearly 1/3 of a million dollars a year to publish. I agree that there are several large publishers out there who are milking everything they can out of subscribers, but for smaller publishers, the move to full open access will end up killing many of them.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
ALL THE FREAKING TIME, I would like to say that this is a very useful tool, but hardly more than a new business model.
No researcher I know goes about their searches by saying "which journal has free access"? Instead, we search web of science, or pubmed, and then try to gain access to the articles one by one. There are so many journals out there, that even with the clearinghouses mentioned below (elsever, etc), there are a multitude of smaller journals that my library cannot afford to allow me electronic access to.
I would LOVE for this not to be the case. But I don't see how it can without putting the companies out of business, or making this a backdoor government funded access (note that the majority of publishing costs are paid from grants, which are usually granted by a federal agency), not that this is much different from my library paying for access to them, except with the library system, more people get access, most likely for more money.
Not much to say here, just pointing out that it's never simple.
hmmmm?
Maybe you can answer this:
Why the cost disparity between for-profit publishers and professional society journals? I don't mean the page charges so much as the subscription costs. For example, the APS, AIP, and ACS are nonprofit, have author page charges that aren't too bad, and charge some not crazy amount to universities for subscriptions that include online access to archived content. Elsevier has higher page charges and extortionate subscription charges to universities and libraries.
Given that publishers like Elsevier provide similar services, and if anything should have bigger economies of scale because they publish more journals, I am forced to conclude that Elsevier's higher prices are a result of trying to maximize profits. This is fine from the perspective of capitalism, but given the choice of supporting nonprofit professional societies vs. lining the pockets of Elsevier's shareholders, I know which way I want to go.
Look, the basic problem here is that economics cannot, and should not, ever be applied to academic research. Of any kind, in any field. Research costs a lot of money. That money shouldn't come from researchers - because we don't want researchers who spend all their time worrying about money, rather than actually researching. Corporations, governments, etc., they can contribute all they want - like they do now. The point isn't "this journal is better, and it charges authors" or "vanity publishing is bad" - the point is that economics and academics DON'T mix.
Sure, there MIGHT be some economic benefits to SOME research. But you can't predict it - nobody can. If you knew what tomorrow's next big thing was definitely going to be, then why aren't you inventing it right now? It's not enough to just say, vaguely, 'biotech' or 'nanotech' or 'communications infrastructures' - those are really nonspecific broad umbrella terms that cover a wide range of academic interests and pursuits, the majority of which will never be of interest to anyone but other researchers and scientists. But that doesn't mean that you should run along with the big ol' yard-stick of economic benefit.
Pay-for-publish is bad because it starts to put a dollar value on research, and it allows money to start determining directions in research, which it absolutely should not do.
Charge FOR the journals, not to write for them.
PLOS (a nonprofit) has moved open access substantially forward, but it takes money to do it, and the PLOS staffers don't come cheap. The executive director of PLOS made $230,000 in 2002 (info via Guidestar.com), and the rest of the team is similarly well-paid. Open access publishers like PLOS: a good thing, but probably transitional to something like Arxiv for the life sciences, community-moderated, effectively free, at least in comparison to the present market. It seems stupid to ask authors to pay $1,500 per article or any other amount when the money supports (in the case of PLOS, incredibly well-compensated) people and organizations that are basically pass-through agents. Looked at another way, the salary noted above is equivalent to the publication of 153 articles under PLOS's business model. And that's just one staffer. This is not to take away from the efforts and successes of PLOS, but the finances are just as ridiculous as a commercial publisher charging $10,000 for a subscription.
Biology is kind of a strange field. There is a lot of money out there.
I'm currently in grad school for Bioinformatics, so I see Biology incorporating many aspects from CS (at least that's part of the hope for the people I work with). As biologists are doing more bioinformatics research, they also have large data sets, huge images, algorithms, and even open source software that they can't include in their paper. A lot of them set up a web page for each paper where you can go to download their data sets, programs, etc.
It works out pretty well (IMO) as you are able to be published in large, well-known journals, but also give people access to more information if they want it.
I'm the developer of an Open Access Journal management system called HyperJournal. It's still in its infancy (alpha) but it has a lot of interesting features and the community is growing fast. You can find more info at http://www.hjournal.org/. If you like it please join us!
In the words of T. McKenna: "If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed."
Trace the current money flows, and you will understand.
Right now, the big for-pay journals make a large chunk of their money by way of Library subscriptions. I've heard that some of the larger campus systems pay up to $100K per year to the big journals (Science, Nature) for the library subscription.
Where does that $ come from? A good portion of it comes from "overhead", which is the 30% or so the University charges a Lab for water, electricity, office space, administration, etc.
So, right now, the money goes like this:
US Taxpayer -> Taxes -> Government General Fund -> Grants (NIH, etc.) -> Research Labs -> (30%) -> Overhead -> University General Budget -> Library Budget -> Journal Subscriptions.
Because this money flow is hidden, many people don't understand that it exists. Thus the cry of "it's unfair to charge people to publish!" as well as the mistaken belief that the for-profit journals are "successful businesses" rather than being highly subsidized.
I am a scientist, and basically write and publish papers for a living.
I really understand the issues that are driving people to demand open access for research.
However, I'm deeply troubled by the movement toward asking authors to pay. It's not just because I'm an author either.
Once you start asking authors, or institutions of authors, to pay, where does the argument about closed access increasing costs go? When an article costs an institution $1000 to publish, the cost of a subscription of $20000 doesn't seem so bad--at least, if individuals at your institution are publishing. The only institutions that benefit, then, are those who aren't producing research. So institutions that produce research bear the costs of the research and publication, for the benefit of those who don't? Perhaps it's not unreasonable, but I'm not sure it would fundamentally change anything.
Currently some publishers waive costs for authors who cannot pay (e.g., PLoS). How long can that be sustainable, though? What's the incentive for an author to pay $1000 to have their article published when they can simply claim inability to pay with no repercussions? I don't believe that these waivers are sustainable at all. Most importantly, at that point, without waivers, why would anyone publish in a journal at all? It's more likely, then, that people would just self-publish on the web. How to identify papers of merit? Well, a service such as a blog or a moderation system that would be paid by...guess what...advertisements and subscriptions! So we're back at the beginning.
And lastly, there's the whole issue of payment by authors affecting the legitimacy of the publication process. I understand the ethical quandaries associated with advertising and whatnot, but it seems to me that's an entirely thing altogether than payments that are directly tied to the acceptance or rejection of a paper. There's too powerful an incentive to accept papers to generate money.
It seems the only sustainable thing is to accept papers that people will want to read, and charge something for people to read those papers. It's a simple supply-and-demand issue. People's work will get read due to the hierarchy of publishing media.
I actually prefer a model where open access is limited to non-profit organizations who are funded by some public source as a service, or a model where articles are made openly available after a certain short length of time--e.g., 6 months, a year, or whatever seems reasonable for the field. Then there's still an incentive for people to pay to have access to the most recent research.
More than open access issues, I personally am more troubled by the increasing number of journals that seem sort of unnecessary to me.
You're welcome. Glad I could help. You might want to add Haystack as a customized front-end.
There's also Known Space as a good base to build from.
"It works out pretty well (IMO) as you are able to be published in large, well-known journals, but also give people access to more information if they want it."
I guess DVDs haven't arrived yet.
Sounds like you all want two paths then.
Path one: The raw material, take your chances.-Free
Path two: Fully vetted, and publication ready-Costs money.
Shoot them both, and let Darwin sort them out.
http://www.daffodil.de/
"An Agent-Based Architecture
for Supporting High-Level Search Activities
in Federated Digital Libraries
for Computer Science"
OK, But there is a baseline of information here that is missing, and let's take a look at the pricing/payment model, and see how all of this REALLY works - whether you pay for publication or no... This regards academic based publication only, by the way, though that it the lion's share. The Research is done under the auspice of the University, often funded through grants. So, in the majority of cases, a taxpayer supported institution being support3d by taxpaer dollars. Right so far? Either the institution or the grant funding stream [ok, nearly always the grant funding stream] pays for the Publication costs, thus using taxpayer dollars to send this information to the Publisher [after it goes through the traditional vetting process, peer review]. Once the paper is published, how then, in the traditional model, is it accessed? Yes, it's accessed through the University Library system. Once again, tax dollars at work. Don't have a Univ. affiliation? The odds of getting your hands on serious quality scientific publications are pretty slim. So, the institution/grant agency pays to DO the Research. The institution/grant agency pays to format and then to Publish the Research. And then, once this process is DONE, the Univ. Library then pays for the Publications THEMSELVES via subscription, even though they [as a group] are the ones that PAID originally to DO the research. In the Open Access model, the first two steps DO remain the same, but once the material is published... It is free on the Web for the Common Good, and access is there for all. Tell me, how is this not a BETTER model?
For many reasons, institutional libraries should pay the page charges for their institutional users rather than pay proprietary publishers for a license to read a paper.
Once a library ends a non-open-access electronic subscription, it no longer can access articles published while it paid for access. Same if the publisher goes out of business. With a paper subscription, the library at least has printed copies from when it subscribed.
The page charge is a one-time cost whereas the license fee is paid by every library on the planet that subscribes to the journal. With digital rights management (DRM), it might be paid each time a user reads an article. Economists tell us that goods should, in a free market, sell for marginal cost. The marginal cost to allow someone to download a PDF file is nearly zero. Here is an estimate. A T1 line, in the US, costs perhaps US$1000/month and offers about 0.2MB/s of bandwidth (megabytes not megabits), figures I got from http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question372.htm. A month has roughly 20 million seconds, so the cost per megabyte is given by:
That comes out to (1/40) cents/MB. Being conservative, say that the full T1 bandwidth is only 25% used and that website administration adds another factor of 2 to the cost, so multiply the above cost by 8. The result is still only 0.2 cents/MB. For a typical 0.1MB pdf article, it is 0.02 cents per download. Even if an article is downloaded 10000 times (most authors would love to be so frequently read!), the total cost is $2. It is a tiny cost compared to reviewing articles, convering them to a decent publication format (e.g. converting to TeX/LaTeX or dealing with absurd figure formats).
Along the lines of charging marginal cost, the open-access page charges are probably the publisher's marginal cost (or only a bit higher than it). Fine! Scientists would like helpful service providers, such as open-access publishers, to stay in business for a long time, and should be willing to support them.
Which brings up a third reason for open-access publication: archiving. All publishers (except perhaps the Royal Society in London, which has published for over 300 years) will go out of business. What happens to their archive of pdf (or whatever format) articles? With open-access publishing, other repositories can mirror all the articles (thereby also redistributing the already tiny bandwidth costs). Replication is the best way to preserve data. Similarly, if the files need to be converted to a new format (PDF version 25, SVG, or whatever), anyone can do so with open-access articles.
A fourth reason, related to archiving, is search indexing. If articles are freely available, auto-indexes such as http://scholar.google.com/ will pick it up. If the article is guarded by subscription passwords, it will not be indexed unless the publisher submits the articles to the index. And they may be too busy, or they may be out of business (see reason three above).
As an example of how proprietary publishers can act, Gordon and Breach (GandB), since bought by Taylor and Francis, sued the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in the US, Germany, France, Switzerland because the AIP published a price comparison, and Gordon and Breach's journals came at or near the bottom of the table (i.e. most expensive). GandB claimed that the table was false advertising under the Lanham Act. http://barschall.stanford.edu/ has trial judgements and transcript, as well as the original articles and pricing tables in dispute.
The AIP won the case almost completely, but it cost them millions of dollars. And that cost has affected the thinking of research librarians
I don't see why they shouldn't be open source. As a scientist, I believe that the research I do, which is for the most part, subsdised by the government, should be free to others to access. Peer review ensures that what is published escapes the vortex of pseudoscientific drivel that is out there (I recall a freind showing me a book on "personal magnetism" published in the 1920's that claimed you could send an 'ion burst' from your forehead to affect those who opposed you, stupefying them into submission." Written by a Ph.D. which made it legitimate, of course). Recently I was trying to access some work as a reference to my dissertation, and I was told by the website that I could pay $75 to access the article for 48 hours! Along with that insult came the realization that once done with my degree, my dissertation automatically goes to ScienceDirect, who will then sell copies for $35 (which I get $0). In order to graduate, I MUST release my work to them. This sugests that the current system is less than fair to all, and I believe making it open source would rectify this problem to some degree. The price that institutions pay for journals is rediculous, and really anymore it doesn't matter what journal things are published in. Here is my theory on how it used to be: Once upon a time, people only read the best journals because they didn't have access to all the journals out there, and given the limited amount of search time and search resources, they stuck to the "goodies". Nowadays, however, with advanced search engines etc... you no longer have this limited access/time/resource problem, which makes the more lenient journals as accessable as the more elite. Surely those poor dolts toiling away to get tenure have to aspire to be published in the A-list journals, but the layman (read: grad student) doesn't really give a flip if it appears in the journal of elite learning or Uncle Bob's Skool Tymes as long as it is on topic, makes sense, and is well written. The peer revies process is a safety net (not perfect of course) for the worst papers, but overall helps to keep the stuff that is published honest. Open source is a great way to share all this important knowledge. Professors should relish it because it means they get cited more often. Students should love it because it's easy to find what they need. The only one who loses is whoever is making bank from the exorbant subscription costs that are currently being charged. Somebody is making money here..and it isn't the typesetters, the statisticians, or the copy-editors. If a journal costs $7000 a year per institution, the first 100 institutions to subscribe more than cover it's yearly costs...
see the work flow diagrams towards the bottom. The basic workflow is more or less the same regardless of whether you modify and existing tool or roll your own.
An easier ethical solution is to take money for a submission, with no promise of publication. This would still cover the costs of peer review, editing, etc., but the journal wouldn't be hurt by refusing to publish a work for lack of quality. (of course, if it gets a reputation for never publishing, this could be a different issue).
I can easily see that one of the costs of the more popular journals may be the costs of vetting all of the submissions they get.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
see Ted Bergstrom's fine page:
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.ciao,
gi."Personally, I would not cite an article that has been published in an open access journal until they gain more respectability and history (primarily so that I can better judge how stringent their peer-review process is)."
So, if an article in a such a journal had direct bearing on your research, and you read it, you wouldn't cite it if you were publishing something related? I would consider that a poor researcher in ANY field.
Heaven forbid if someone asked you about that article after publishing said paper or a talk at a conference. I don't know what would be worse saying "I haven't read it" or "I didn't wan't to cite it because it came from X journal. The first says sloppy researcher and the second says fool.
It's one thing if the article is crap and stating that is the reason-heck that is the only good reason that won't leave you with egg on the face....t