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."
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.
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.
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.