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."

Comments

Isn't that what research is for?

[KingSkippus]

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.

Re:Isn't that what research is for?

[ghoti]

The point is that if you pay to have your paper published, then perhaps the reviewing standards arent't that strict. And what makes a good journal is a tough reviewing process that will only let the best papers get published (see the story about the randomly generated paper a few stories back for a counterexample ...).

You are right of course, that research should be published - but publications are also a measure of academic acievement. So if everything gets published , how can you tell what is useful and what is crap?

It's about time. But why the huge author costs?

[DoctoRoR]

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.

Re:It's about time. But why the huge author costs?

[evvk]

> Electronic typesetting is not cheap,

Yes it is. Ever head of LaTeX? Many journals in the more tech-savvy fields (maths/cs/physics/engineering) want camera ready documents using their provided LaTeX document class.

Re:It's about time. But why the huge author costs?

[Phillip2]

"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."

This is patent nonsense. About 90% of the papers that I have published to require camera ready copy. In general the most that the publishers have to do is stick their copyright lines at the bottom.

"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."

This would be read and evaluated by peer reviewers. Whom you noticable do not pay. So, in fact, its the cost of paying for an editor, and a secretary to keep track of who is doing what.

"Electronic typesetting is not cheap, not is something automatic just because its electronic. A human has to decide where articles go, how figures are positions etc. "

Generally speaking, the authors. What you say is true for a few journals but I doubt that it is true for most.

Journal publishers are on a pork barrel. They make something like 5bn dollars a year just in the US. And they prevent the scientists from doing their job. I can not access full text of the past publications. I'm even in the absurd position that I am breaking copyright by publishing my own work, on my own web site.

I firmly hope that the days of the current business model of scientific publishers is over. Open access is not only desirable, its vital.

Phil

Re:It's about time. But why the huge author costs?

[hanssprudel]

To be honest, this makes you sound like some high school/college kid who has never published an article, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and ask you what field you work in.

No, you are the one who comes across as extremely ignorant. I can't speak for the original author, but, as has been stated several times in this thread, authors preparing camera ready articles in LaTeX is standard in the more mathematical sciences. This includes math, physics, computer science, statistics, etc.

Trust me, scientists cannot format a paper for publishing, don't want to, and shouldn't be required to. Preparing a paper for print requires professionals that have training and experience at their jobs. Someday you should take a look at a pile of grant applications, which tend to represent the best writing most scientists can do. You're lucky to avoid serious grammatical errors, and are unlikely to see even correct indenting, much less some beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc. It already takes months to write a paper, and now you want people with no training or interest to learn how to become publishers? Ridiculous.

I am at the mathematical institution of a major university right now. There are over a hundred researchers in this building alone - and I promise you that to the last one they are all capable of preparing their own papers for publication in LaTeX. Even turning in a masters thesis done some other way is frowned upon greatly.

Also, since the papers are reformatted (both text and graphics) for publishing, the publishers don't even want the authors to try to format their papers, because it will look like crap, and it just makes more work for them. Normally you submit your article text in a fairly non-structured form, and submit your graphics and charts separately in a different format.

I don't understand how you can claim to work in academic publishing and you don't even seem to know what LaTeX is. In LaTeX, you define the structure of the document, and all the typesetting is done for automatically. I have the aesthetic sense of a warthog, and I can produce "correct indenting, beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc" because it is just a simple matter of applying a document class to the my .tex file.

See my response to your first assertion. You are incorrect. Scientists are not publishers, and lack the training and interest. Also, how is the author supposed to know how his or her article fits into the journal? Do you just assume that every article starts with a full page, and waste a lot of space? There are so many problems with this idea it's not even worth contemplating.

Authors do not do the typesetting. They produce an article structure, set up by defining sections, subsections, figures, etc, and then a simple FREE program does it all for them. You seem to be in denial because your job depends entirely on the luditry of members of the non-technical sciences...

Excellent for Wikipedia

[ta bu shi da yu]

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.

Paying 1.500$ to publish?!

[kkumer]

At PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology, for example, authors pay $1,500 each [...]

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.

This is a very important development

[NimNar]

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.

CS journals are not easily free

[maxjenius22]

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.

Wikipedia still needs a citation mechanism

[jesterzog]

To write a thorough entry, quite a bit of research must be done.

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.

Re:Best journal charge; weak journals dont

[ghoti]

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.

Maybe CS publishing is more webcentric

[steve_l]

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).

For profit vs. professional societies

[dr. loser]

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.