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?

Re:Isn't that what research is for?

[CowbertPrime]

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.

Re:Isn't that what research is for?

[sas-dot]

It's not correct to say traditional publishers don't ask for money to publish. Some journals require you to pay fee(see in page charges heading). See this link for a debate on the open journals published in Nature

Test them for vetted submissions

[robogun]

Generate one automagically here and see if it is accepted.

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?

[Jon Peterson]

I work for a major medical publisher, so I'll explain what I can...

"I never understood the economics of peer-reviewed scientific journals. The authors don't get any money"

This is correct, authors are not paid for submissions.

" and are usually tech-savvy enough to produce well-formatted papers."

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. In our case we mark the data up in a complex XML schema and do some clever layout things to format the articles. Many places just do it by hand in Quark or whatever.

" The peer-reviewers (at least when I peer reviewed) didn't get any money."

Correct.

" And being an editor is an academic feather in your cap."

Incorrect. Articles are edited by professional editors. That means you need, at _least_, a doctorate in medicine, a very high standard of English, and several years editorial experience. This isn't a cheap person to employ, and you need many of them. These people are of course helped by a team of professional sub-editors and copy-editors.

"So the cost of content and the cost of reviewing the content is close to zero."

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. They must _all_ be read by _several_ people with the knowledge to actually understand what the paper is talking about. Then those people must meet weekly (or however often the publication comes out) and decide which papers are in and which are out. Then the whole peer review and editorial process begins.

Other jobs that cost money are:

Statisticians. A professional is needed to check the figures and calculations in the papers, as they are often wrong.

Production assistants. Peer reviewers and authors are not paid. This gives them little incentive to do things either on time or in the way they are asked. Someone has to nicely chase them and organise them and help them.

Technical people (like me!). Converting large amounts of complex XML into things like printer ready PDF (that's as in commercial printer, not laserjet), XHTML, exports for pubmed etc, is not trivial.

" 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?"

Yes. Electronic typesetting is not cheap, not is something automatic just because its electronic. A high quality journal cannot be laid out by machine. A human has to decide where articles go, how figures are positions etc. No layout engine we've ever seen is up to this except in simple cases.

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?

[justforaday]

I work for a medical publication and I can assure you that our authors, however brilliant they may be in their field, are simply not up to the task of providing LaTeX documents. Most are competent (at best) at using a computer. However, they can look at a radiograph and tell you exactly what's wrong and several ways to go about fixing it...

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...

legitimate eventually to cite self-education?

[digitalextremist]

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?

ugh more wired nonsense

[CowbertPrime]

"Traditional" academic journals actually get very little money from commercial advertising. Many specialized field journals have been using "pay for play" models well before the Internet came along. With these journals, such as the Journal of Immunology, each article usually bears the following disclaimer:

The cost of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

I have been through the manuscript submission process and you have to pay big bucks once your paper is accepted for publication: $200 per article if you have supplemental information (material that doesn't fit in the manuscript but still published), $70 per printed page, and $325 per color figure for printing a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article. If you want to allow your article on Open Access, you'll need to pony up another $750-$1000 dollars.

Serious journals are not free

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Paying 1.500$ to publish?!

[Tingulli 3]

Well, I am an astrophysicist working outside the US, so I'll throw in some thoughts: 1) The preprint server arxiv.org is fundamental but still there is no peer review on papers. I can cite you more than one utterly ridiculous paper on astro-ph and gr-qc lists. So use it with care 2) Astrophysical journal IS charging non-US researcher with costs on a per-page basis. So I think that the PLOS politic is more than acceptable. 3) The copyright agreements traditional journals ask you to sign are as offending as a Microsoft EULA So, in the end, I think the "author pays, everybody has access" approach seems to work pretty well, If we have to pay in some way for peer review and proofs correction.

Not the advertising, but the cost of information

[kilraid]

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.

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.

Re:This is a very important development

[3th3rn3t]

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.

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.

Re:Going about doing this.

[filthy-raj]

An Institutional Repository (IR). Save yourself from rolling your own! Check this out mate: DSpace

Disregard this if you already have knowledge of the project, or, if it doesn't suit your needs. This is a very powerful and mature development of peer-review, content management workflow and academic submission from MIT. It is an IR, NOT a content management system!

Your friend,

Raj.

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.

If you can't pay, you don't have to

[FleaPlus]

From the PLoS FAQ:

What if I can't afford publication charges?

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. Authors may also qualify for discounts on publication charges via their institution or a funded program; see our institutional members page for more information.

Best journal charge; weak journals dont

[Anonymous Coward]

You are obviously not a scientist because you have no idea how scientific publishing works, at least in the US.

Best journals, with highest sientific standards, tough referees, are those charging publications costs. Why? They are published by non-profit organizations, and have no money. Usually the bigger the charges the better the reputation of the journal.

Commercial publishers usually dont charge the authors, they make money by selling the journals. However, they are less reputable than the non-commerial journals. For example, Annals of Physics (commercial, published by Academic Press) does charge but has a worse reputation than Physical Review (non profit) which charges a lot.

Not knowing how science publishing works, you apply economics and draw wrong conclusions which are not consistent with the facts. The odds of being rejected are higher for journals who charge, because they are non-commercial and have higher scientific standards. THEY ONLY CHARGE YOU AFTER THE PAPER WAS ACCEPTED, IF YOU ARE REJECTED YOU DONT PAY A DIME.

Regarding my own research, I always try to publish in non-commercial journals, with page charges, because they have a better reputation. I only send papers to commercial journals if they are not good enough for a non-commnercial journals.

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.

Speaking as a Publisher ....

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for one of the largest scientific publishers, yup we have over 1000 academic journals, and as ever the story is not as simple as it might seem at first.

We are not simply robber barons that leech profit off the back of the honest hard working scientist. I think one ought to understand that we truly believe that we can offer services that are worth the costs, and that we help to increase the base value of scientific literature.

The publishing model that is currently in place has been around for a long time. I.e. where scientists submit for publication in a peer reviewed journal, the running costs of which are boune by a publishing house. In some cases this model has been around for over 150 years. Instant access via the internet is still a young technology in comparison. As publishers we know things are going to change redically, but naturally we take a conservative view. Free open source publishing is an attractive idea, but it has to generate revenue in order to cover maintencece costs. While the curret closed source system continues to generate revenue, since histroically this is the model we as publihsers know how to work with, it is a model that will stay around.

What is it that we can offer?

Well, the main thing is publishing of scientific content. Yes, for some people making their own servers and files is a snip, but most scientists are far too busy chasing funding money (which is where ultimatly most of the publication costs are coverd from), doing research, teaching classes. It simply does not make sense for scientists to be publihsers too. Their time is more valuable when spent doing science!

We offer secure archiving, back compatability (making pre-digital issues available to the community), we offer distribution, help with language conversion, we offer content in a form that allows people to data mine the papers.

The poeple I work with love science, I love talking to scientists about their work. Bringing a book into the world is kind of cool too. High costs are due to low unit sales, thats just the econimics of the thing.

The principle goal of a publisher is, of course, to turn a profit, but to do so whilst offering a service. We believe in what we do.

There are many many other issues to think about too, the low number of papers that get cited, data glut and the role a publisher can play in helping to provide meta-sorting/pre-screening. Quality control/peer review, etc, etc .

Anyhoo, I got to get back to making books!

Mod parent down!

[NegativeOneUserID]

Mod parent down!

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).

Open Access

[justforaday]

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.

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.