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.
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.
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.
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.