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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
Well you're wrong, I am a scientist, and I also publish. It's just that in my area (visualization), there aren't any non-commercial journals, only journals which will ask your for page fees that are not compulsory.
But the situation is different in physics, I guess. And you're right about paying after being accepted, of course, but it still feels strange. But that needs some getting used to, I guess.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
"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
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
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).
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.