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."
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.