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?
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
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.
So if everything gets published , how can you tell what is useful and what is crap?
:)
slasdot-style moderation!
-1 This is wrong, everyone knows that.
+1 This is right, everyone knows that.
Or, a wikipedia-type system, where everyone can review the article, and everyone else can read the reviews and decide for themselves.
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.
How you pay for editing, formatting, printing, and distribution is a separate issue from how you establish credibility. Credibility, IMHO, is created through reputable peer review and editorial standards. Credibility can be helped by forcing a mind-shift among the scientific community, so that the respected researchers both submit to and peer review open access journals. Mandating that scientists submit to open access journals, as a prerequisite of government grants, is a great way to bootstrap this shift.
Vanity press does not equal pay-to-publish. One means that the author can get his work published regardless of its merit (hence the "vanity"). The other means that the author has to pay, but does not preclude a peer review vetting process.
In terms of the ethics of pay-to-publish and the possible dilution of scientific credibility, it is important to realize a couple of things:
:)
1. PLoS is dedicated to being a highly respectable scientific journal of the same stature as the "biggies" such as Nature or Cell. Their review process is just as stringent, and their reviewers are scientists of equally high reputation, as other journals. (I'm getting this both from their "core principles" at http://www.plos.org/about/principles.html and also from talking to some professors in the Stanford biochemistry department--where I used to work--with which some of the founders are affiliated and which is one of the institutions where PLoS first got off the ground.)
2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funds numerous biological sciences labs, will provide funding to support publication fees *IF* the research is published in open-access journals
3. PLoS says: "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." (http://www.plos.org/faq.html#openaccess)
So it's much much better than it might seem at first approximation!
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."
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.
Not to mention that some articles in particular are not even accessible using the library subscription. I have been actively involved in the academia for two years or so, and i have come acros a number of highly-ranked articles (ie. Nature or Elsevier) that i cant access even by using my library subscription but was asked to actually purchase the article.
I tend to agree up to a certain degree with your opinion on branding of scientific journals. Different journals however actually propose different standards and their names are usually supplied in order to assess the quality of one's work. For example publishing in an IEEE or an Oxford Press Bioinformatics journal is not the same as publishing in an IASTED one etc. I am not necessarily saying this is a right thing but people who publish tend to try to publish in journals (or conferences for that matter) that are considered as higher ranking.
Thankfully. the field of Bioinformatics and Medicine is more 'open' that other fields i have encountered. Most articles are available without a subscription on major biomedical databases such as MedLINE etc. I do tend to believe that the only way to 'solve' this problem is by giving the authors the ability to control their work even after it has been published. An author should be able to specify is his work will be available for free from the publishers site or not.
Best journals, with highest sientific standards, tough referees, are those charging publications costs.
Medical journals do charge for publication, and I can confirm that this field practically all journals are (at least officially) linked to non-profit organizations.
However, they are often published and distributed by private companies which do like to make a dime here and there.
The result is a bastardized system in which you pay a significant amount of money for publication, in the form of a reimbursement (for example, color pictures will usually cost you more.)
Then, when you get published you lose pretty much any (copy)right over what you submitted. Readers will then get to pay serious money for yearly subscriptions: they usually start from $100 for online-only; over $200 when they decide you have to sign up for paper copies over snail mail as well.
Moreover, the cost for access to a single article is usually outrageous: $20 to $50 for one article.
As stated in the blurb, things are a-changin': OpenAccess is gaining ground, but we're still far from an ethical system. BioMed Central has been a serious promoter of open access in research articles. The real problem is that a journal's prestige is still significantly more likely to host the most important advancements in medicine, and BioMed's stuff is still far from, say, JAMA or Anesthesiology.
I can't really see the ethics in a non-profit society publishing its journal with, say, Elsevier, robbing you of your rights over your own work while asking you money for that, and then proceeding to charge $250 for a year's subscription to their journal.
Remember dude; Intelligence is relative as well. Our species is smarter than the other primates (who all participate in and precipitate some sort of violence against themselves) but, assuming we avoid extinction in the next hundred thousand years or so, we can expect to spin off an even more intelligence species (or multiple species even!) Before we let go of our need to war, we've got to show that we are smart enough to let go of our self-hatred and the despair and demorality of Religion.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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.
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.