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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."
"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 not correct to say traditional publishers don't ask for money to publish. Some journals require you to pay fee(see in page charges heading). See this link for a debate on the open journals published in Nature
Well, I am an astrophysicist working outside the US, so I'll throw in some thoughts: 1) The preprint server arxiv.org is fundamental but still there is no peer review on papers. I can cite you more than one utterly ridiculous paper on astro-ph and gr-qc lists. So use it with care 2) Astrophysical journal IS charging non-US researcher with costs on a per-page basis. So I think that the PLOS politic is more than acceptable. 3) The copyright agreements traditional journals ask you to sign are as offending as a Microsoft EULA So, in the end, I think the "author pays, everybody has access" approach seems to work pretty well, If we have to pay in some way for peer review and proofs correction.
An Institutional Repository (IR). Save yourself from rolling your own! Check this out mate: DSpace
Disregard this if you already have knowledge of the project, or, if it doesn't suit your needs. This is a very powerful and mature development of peer-review, content management workflow and academic submission from MIT. It is an IR, NOT a content management system!
Your friend,
Raj.
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.
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.
I work for a major medical publisher, so I'll explain what I can...
"I never understood the economics of peer-reviewed scientific journals. The authors don't get any money"
This is correct, authors are not paid for submissions.
" and are usually tech-savvy enough to produce well-formatted papers."
This is incorrect. Formatting even simple papers is difficult, let alone ones with complex graphs and tables. It's not something an author can (or wants) to do. In our case we mark the data up in a complex XML schema and do some clever layout things to format the articles. Many places just do it by hand in Quark or whatever.
" The peer-reviewers (at least when I peer reviewed) didn't get any money."
Correct.
" And being an editor is an academic feather in your cap."
Incorrect. Articles are edited by professional editors. That means you need, at _least_, a doctorate in medicine, a very high standard of English, and several years editorial experience. This isn't a cheap person to employ, and you need many of them. These people are of course helped by a team of professional sub-editors and copy-editors.
"So the cost of content and the cost of reviewing the content is close to zero."
Not at all. The other major cost is the cost of reviewing papers. A major journal will receive ten times more papers than it can publish. Each one needs to be read and evaluated. They must _all_ be read by _several_ people with the knowledge to actually understand what the paper is talking about. Then those people must meet weekly (or however often the publication comes out) and decide which papers are in and which are out. Then the whole peer review and editorial process begins.
Other jobs that cost money are:
Statisticians. A professional is needed to check the figures and calculations in the papers, as they are often wrong.
Production assistants. Peer reviewers and authors are not paid. This gives them little incentive to do things either on time or in the way they are asked. Someone has to nicely chase them and organise them and help them.
Technical people (like me!). Converting large amounts of complex XML into things like printer ready PDF (that's as in commercial printer, not laserjet), XHTML, exports for pubmed etc, is not trivial.
" 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?"
Yes. Electronic typesetting is not cheap, not is something automatic just because its electronic. A high quality journal cannot be laid out by machine. A human has to decide where articles go, how figures are positions etc. No layout engine we've ever seen is up to this except in simple cases.
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.
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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.
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.
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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!
I work for a medical publication and I can assure you that our authors, however brilliant they may be in their field, are simply not up to the task of providing LaTeX documents. Most are competent (at best) at using a computer. However, they can look at a radiograph and tell you exactly what's wrong and several ways to go about fixing it...
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.