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MIT To Make All Faculty Publications Open Access
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica:
"If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."
now that's the kind of university that one would want his/her children to go to.
Read radical news here
This should put to rest any concerns that closed access journals protect the interests of the authors.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Kudos to the MIT faculty for choosing the right road forward.
FreeBSD bounties
This is a major blow to an industry with an outdated business model. Scientific publication is starting to move beyond the need for the middleman, and I am extremely glad to see it happen.
That said, the major publishers will scramble to try and patch this hole in the business model, and they will probably make the overall situation worse before it really starts to improve.
Oh well. Got to start that process at some point. Go MIT.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
They're setting America on a path to certain destruction. Why how's a good, god-fearing businessman gonna make a buck if he can't do it by reselling publicly funded publications???
I think the businessmen have tried to close public access to NOAA data too.
As much as I congratulate MIT on this, I'd be interested to see the official vote tally. MIT's faculty is rather largeish, and the article itself says that faculty are caught in the middle between the need for funding and the need for exposure. There's no way in hell that vote was unanimous. Sounds more like the motion passed by a simple majority, someone introduced one of those silly, "Motion to declare the outcome of this vote unanimous," motions, which was then passed by the same people. That's just speculation, but seriously...not one single dissenter on the entire faculty? No way.
When USAID funds technical publications produced by international nonprofits -- stuff like this -- they require that the publications be made free to the world with the possible exception of production and shipping costs. Taxpayer money paid for it; all taxpayers should be able to benefit. (although that same nonprofit is trying to tell us how to spend our money....)
Many of the professors I know of host copies of their publications on their lab websites for all to view. Perhaps this decision by MIT is the first of its type officially, but it's hardly new.
My notion of Computer Science is, that you will always find published papers on the homepages of the relevant authors. Regardless, of what the publishers say. If the publishers make you require sign away your copyright you will almost always find the relevant paper either in some "draft version" or some "technical report", slightly reformulated but essentially the same.
I always thought that this is the standard also in other disciplines. What is the publication standard in other disciplines?
It's about time that publicly funded research make it back into the public domain. I'm sick and tired of my tax money going to enriching institutions of higher learning, and big Pharma (and other corporations) and seeing nothing in return but more generally useless, largely unnecessary, and unjustifiably expensive drugs, not to mention huge salaries.
I have a really hard time coming up with good arguments against open access publishing. Do they exist? Or are all arguments against flat out support of the publishers' business model?
The original article I read said they would encourage MIT faculty and students to put their articles on a MIT-supplied website and back authors to obtain copyright permission. However, they weren't going to abrogate copyright contracts of existing articles and put the stuff out there without permission of the copyright holder. As more and more major institutions get on board this will back the expensive, commercial journals into a corner.
A possible compromise with the journals might be a 6 to 12 month delay before it goes on the MIT site.
MIT has an excellent track record for these sorts of initiatives, going all the way back to the MIT Press, and more recently its open courseware. This does not take into account the numerous events involving individual faculty who have initiated a project or taken a principled stand of one kind or another along the same lines in an atmosphere of support within the MIT culture.
As I see the situation, these initiatives are partly driven by a deep commitment to the ideals of academic freedom, but they are noteworthy in being pragmatic exercises as well. That's the test of merit where ideals are concerned, to see what happens when you implement them in real life. It's an engineering mindset, and my God, it works remarkably well.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I am currently not affiliated with an university and have noticed increased difficulty in reading research journals at nearby libraries. The main culprit is online storage. Almost all the research libraries allow physical public patron access. But I can only read the online journals if I purchase a university computer account. I estimate over the past five years from the shrinkage of the magazine racks, half of the library journal subscriptions are only online now.
Does this mean that MIT will not be publishing anything in Science or Nature? Somehow I don't believe that.
Computer and engineering journals are fairly receptive to open publication. However, the medical journal industry is viciously protective. Pre-publication of articles threatens rejection and potential loss of priority rights. A lot of this is due to biotech which seeks to keep new technology hidden as long as possible. A number of people with fatal illness have complained to congressmen about the difficulty of accessing research on their diseases.
So what do you say, CalTech, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.? Your silence is deafening.
It's a relief to see some elites in the country live up to the higher standard expected of them, unlike, say, oh... I don't know... BANKERS?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
More universities MUST join this. Preferably, a number of state universities. At that point, congressmen will have a difficult time saying no to this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is the same in many other disciplines. In economics, for example, this kind of story is non-news.
For the past 10+ years, even most "old fashioned" journals allow you to post your paper, as long as you post some blurb acknowledging that you passed copyright to the publisher. That arrangement worked out just fine. As an academic, who cares who has the copyright; just give me the paper!
Even for journals that did not offer this, authors would blatantly post their paper anyway. Yet I never once heard of a publisher going to an economist and asking them to alter their personal web page. (Yeah, yeah, insert "nobody reads the paper anyway" joke here.)
More recently, the field of economics has seen open-access e-journals popping up everywhere. The writing is on the wall, as to the future of access.
Finally, our school is in negotiations to make all publications open-access. This isn't just some faculty declaration; we're working on actually doing it. I imagine other schools are doing the same. So like I said, this is non-news to an insider.
I'm a small-fry researcher at a small-fry university. Without name recognition, what gets my research read is the fact that I can (occasionally, when it's worthy) get it into a name-brand journal where approval of the referees signifies real merit. Without that exposure, no matter how good my research is, it will be very difficult to get it widely read because evaluation of quality takes serious time and thought -- time that most researchers are not willing to spend on every paper on Arxiv posted by any yahoo.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. The most cursory reading of a novel scientific paper is ~10 minutes, and even then, I've probably just read the abstract, skimmed the figures and then jumped to the conclusion. You can't seriously expect me to do that for every vaguely relevant paper in the field -- I just can't. So if there is an important paper that I should read, I count on the journals to bring it to my attention.
IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works. Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Yes, I said "free". For those interested in getting an education from MIT in any course/degree offered, go to MIT OpenCourseWare for full free access to all material needed to learn whatever the school has to offer.
Certification and faculty attention, however, is kinda pricy.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
"MIT To Make All Faulty Publications Open Access"
I guess it is the same thing for a lot of the Publications.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I see this as good and bad.
It is generally a good thing that the research gets out and is seen by as many people as possible. Show me a person off the street who is going to care about some paper on quantum mechanics, however. The scientists and researchers are generally going to have access to these papers in some fashion anyway, via university library electronic journal access or professional groups that they may be a part of (such as the ACM).
The bad thing is that journals may selectively not publish papers they would have previously accepted from a researcher if they require open access. You may not think this is that important. They can find a different place to publish. Things aren't that simple when it comes down to it though. Faculty and research hires and promotions are often based on WHICH journals you publish in as much as how much you publish. As a young researcher I would hate to lose out to someone for a tenured position because they published a few less papers in higher profile journals but I had to publish in lower ranked journals because of open access.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Do you? Or do you pay journal to organize unpaid reviewers to determine the quality of submissions, and to cover the cost of distribution? Because I thought that most reviewers and editors don't get paid.
The point is that now distribution costs can be close to nil, but subscription prices keep increasing. I don't see why an open-access journal that was not affiliated with a commercial publisher could not accomplish the same thing, and maintain the quality of articles. The "imprimatur" will simply no longer come courtesy of a commercial publisher - the brand name, e.g., "Well-Respected Journal of X" can persist. After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Assuming most readers of the Journals agree with this then the decision by the MIT faculty won't adversely affect the Journals. They will still have subscribers and reviewers, they just won't have exclusive copyright on the material.
Since what you are paying for is the work of the Journals' staff everything can stay as it is AND the authors can maintain the right to open their material for access to everyone.
Sounds like win-win to me.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
This is exactly the point against fully open source. Journals create a more level playing field between researchers at (for no fault of their own) no-name universities and those at recognizable universities. Why do you want to publish in Science? Because of the name that goes with the article (i.e. it;s impact), why would you want to go to MIT? For the same reason, as someone has already pointed out you will get the same education at many universities so it makes little sense in paying so much money if you ONLY want a good education but that's not the point. You get instant recognition if you are associated with MIT or with Science. If the publishing also goes to the universities then where will it leave well-deserved research from people in no-name places? So it is actually going to give these universities a monopoly on research not create a means of research dissemination. In this scenario they will get even more money from funding agencies then before. But the journals have gotten out of control and charge far to much for the services they provide, as a reviewer myself I have to do voluntary work for these journals while they make money from it.
So why are we still using "private" journals? The only reasonable answer is : reputation.
Exactly. Public discourse. No cost; internet discourse.
Which leads me to my round-about-point, satirical point: Big Fucking Deal; MIT is now publishing scientific papers on the internet.
This is exactly the point against fully open source. Journals create a more level playing field between researchers at (for no fault of their own) no-name universities and those at recognizable universities. Why do you want to publish in Science? Because of the name that goes with the article (i.e. it;s impact), why would you want to go to MIT? For the same reason, as someone has already pointed out you will get the same education at many universities so it makes little sense in paying so much money if you ONLY want a good education but that's not the point. You get instant recognition if you are associated with MIT or with Science. If the publishing also goes to the universities then where will it leave well-deserved research from people in no-name places? So it is actually going to give these universities a monopoly on research not create a means of research dissemination. In this scenario they will get even more money from funding agencies then before. But the journals have gotten out of control and charge far to much for the services they provide, as a reviewer myself I have to do voluntary work for these journals while they make money from it.
After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
The editors do not work for free, and they (plus staff, also paid) do the majority of the filtering work. Most of the papers submitted don't make it to the reviewers. Without them, the reviewers cannot function due to much larger workload. Yes, I review articles for free. No, I will not review more than 2-3 per month -- each one takes days worth of work to really evaluate to the standard that I feel appropriate. If you are feeding me crap to review, I'd just as well not review at all.
Thoughts:
1. This decision will not affect the publishing industry much, as long as only MIT and similarly well funded institutions are the only ones to have this policy.
For example, I recently published an article in a Springer journal (small circulation) but one that was well suited to the paper's content. To publish the paper "Open Access", I would have been required to pay a fee...something in the neighborhood of $2k-$3k. If I was a big name researcher who was well funded by grants...well...this is exactly the kind of stuff grants can pay for. And since that sort of fee is something like 5% of what it takes to hire a postdoc, it would be only a negligible part of the annual dispersion of grant $.
So for "well endowed" researchers (no pun intended) open access doesn't really limit the journal selection, because many will allow open access for a fee which is reasonable to those that have plenty of cash to burn.
2. For the rest of us that work at a college/uni without funding (or at least one that isn't going to require open access anytime soon) what is the big deal? I realize free as in freedom is the goal and all that...but I read the fine print of the agreement with my publisher:
I agreed to let them have exclusive distribution rights of the published version of the paper. The ideas (patentable, perhaps) are still mine, and I'm even allowed to distribute a "preprint" version of the article on my own website...as long as I've compiled it from my own sources. That's good enough for me.
In the future, when an appropriate journal, of similar level of integrity with the same academic focus which gives open access for free, I'll publish there. Until then, what's the big deal?
You are lucky you get the physical access. Princeton doesn't let the public in.
They may not spend as much time with makeup and outfits as the uberbimbos. But IMHO their bodies are often quite as functional. Even more so: Brains have a lot to do with that.
Tracing the individual variations on peripheral neural pathways and working out their operation is even more fun (for both) when the tracee knows and appreciates what is going on and can give additional feedback beyond the basic flushes, indrawn breath, postures, erections, secretions, etc. And there's such synergy when the partner can reciprocate.
Being able to have an intelligent conversation can be far better afterplay than smoking cigarettes. (Though sometimes it DOES distract.)
Then there's the love for gadgets, tool-making, and tool use. (For instance: It's not a coincidence that some of the largest and most active consensual BDSM communities formed in Silicon Valley and other tech centers and organized over the net and email, or that some of the big names in tech are major participants. Did you really think all that pron on the intertubes was just frustrated geeks who COULDN'T get any? B-) But even if such tastes are more common with geek girls it's far from a universal attraction. So use care bringing it up.)
But one of the hottest things about geek girls is that they can appreciate a geek's mind and tend to be attracted - indeed, turned on - by a good one. If said male geek can reciprocate, treating her as a valued team member rather than someone to play smarter-than-you-nyah mind games on, it's the foundation of a solid long-term relationship.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Great, so now we'll have research evaluation services instead of name brand journals. The difference will be that the evaluation service won't be able to claim copyright over what it's evaluating.
You know who's in a great position to become a research evaluation service? The existing name brand journals, that's who. Subscribers can use them if they want to, but they won't be forced to just to get access to the research.
One can argue that this is a stew of the publishers' own making. When you charge on the order of $20-30+ to receive a copy of a single article (which presumably costs pennies to distribute) then you are asking for a backlash. I applaud MIT for stepping up to the plate and suggest that the other Ivy League schools do so as well. Though the PLoS work which I believe is largely based at Stanford suggests that this is already in progress.
Even PNAS is slowly increasing its public access articles (and with acknowledgement, their archives are largely open). So the public (and students) have much more access to scientific information than they once did. This does not however keep some publishing groups (e.g. Nature) from going in different directions. It appears to me as if Nature is on a path of only publishing commissioned articles [1] for review which may be very difficult for University's or Government's to regulate.
I would challenge Nature's publishers -- here and in public -- "When and how do you intend to implement an open access policy?"
1. It could be argued that Science is only a step behind.
IMO ... a free/open system [loses] the imprimatur of journal publication [producing] increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works.
Which produce the opportunity to fill the void (if the publications don't come to their senses and do it) by organizing a peer-review group to fill this sudden void.
Think "Journal of Links" - though it might also provide editing feedback, talking the author into revisions to improve the paper and/or make it conform to the journal's standards and become suitable for linkage, just as print journals do for publication.
The two functions became conflated by the cost structures of print publishing - allowing the editorial function to be funded by the journal subscription fees as a convenient revenue stream to be tapped.
But the bulk of the work in journal peer-review is volunteer. Seems to me, once the printing costs were eliminated, such a journal could be funded by a number of sources: advertising (i.e. lab equipment suppliers), grants / endowments, making "being an editor of the journal" a prestige function for salaried faculty members, subscriptions to archival-quality links-plus-content hard media, print-on-demand copies of papers (or journal "issues") as a service (for instance by contracting with operations such as Kinkos or Amazon), etc. (Some of these might require a non-exclusive copyright license from the authors as a condition of "inclusion".)
Feel up to organizing such a thing?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm a big fan of the move toward open access. But I worry about the precedent for academic freedom.
Think about it: a university is establishing rules and giving itself oversight over where faculty can publish. From the article: "Anybody who wants to publish with a journal that refuses to grant these rights will have to submit a written request for an exception to the MIT provost." Imagine 2 faculty members who want to publish papers in journals that do not cooperate with MIT's policy. One does popular research that the provost likes, the other does controversial research that the provost doesn't like. Why should the fate of these 2 faculty's research be left in the provost's hands?
Like I said, I agree with the goal, but I worry that this is a lousy way to reach it.
at Harvard it's also a "policy", but getting an exception to the policy is automatic, and the repository certainly shows that most people are taking advantage of it.
see here: http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/Apps/app.php?app=waiver
and a unanimous vote at a campus wide faculty meeting isn't meaningful in any way. i'd wager attendance is below 1/3 of faculty.
More universities MUST join this. Preferably, a number of state universities. At that point, congressmen will have a difficult time saying no to this.
IMHO, now that it is started, evolutionary pressure comes into play.
Those who publish their works online, quickly, with broad access, will be more available for reference from other works, compared to those who wait for journal publication. Their good works will get a higher citation rate and sometimes priority. Such feathers in their cap will selectively advance their careers and retard those of their journal-publishing peers. (Just as journal publishing replaced things like anagram-publication to claim priority without actually making the work public.)
This will work even better if the peer-review function can be disconnected from the print-journal publication and ported to an electronic publication model. That would avoid burying the respectable work in the chaff and aid in search filtering as well as re-enabling the manual method at electronic network, rather than print library, speeds.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Have you submitted an article to a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Have you been a referee for such an article? I have been in both roles, and more than once. Your view of an editor's work is not consistent with my experiences.
As a referee, I was never harassed by an editor. At first, they simply ask if you're willing to referee a paper, and ask you to suggest a different referee if you are unwilling to be referee yourself. If you accept, you're expected to give a reasoned assessment of the article within a few weeks. They typically use several referees, so if there's a laggard, it does not matter. Most referees are conscientious and timely (I and my colleagues are).
As an author, you are expected to follow the guidelines which the journal publishes. Most of them provide LaTeX or Word templates, and strict typesetting guidelines on figures, headings, citations, captions, etc. If you don't follow their guidelines, your article will be rejected by a secretary who will politely provide the formatting guidelines. It won't even reach the editor and certainly won't go out for peer review.
Oh, I also know editors of a few journals personally (including two journals I have published in, but I met the editors long afterwards at conferences). None of them ever mentioned any need for harassment of authors or referees. They did need to harass their own employees (fill the advertising space, dammit!) and subcontractors (this is printed on SC paper, I said to use coated stock!). That's where the time is spent.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If I were a publisher, I'd want the smartest minds in the world to publish in my journal.
I'm sure people would want to read what the geniuses at MIT are doing, and the publishers will have to choose between losing subscribers or making the requirements more lax.
MIT's one of the few schools in the world that can pull off something like this. Most people choose schools because of rankings, and rankings are mostly based on the number of publications, so schools are not very likely to risk lowering their ranking for an ideology. But MIT doesn't care. No one would pay any college ranking that doesn't end with MIT or Caltech.
Nobody is questioning publisher's right to try to make as much money as they can. Nor is anyone really arguing that "publication" should somehow be free. Lets face it, we all pay taxes and most such research is done either directly or indirectly with public funding. So most publications are not "free" even before the words even get into a wordprocess, much less published.
What the MIT faculty and others are doing in pushing for more open models of publishing is responding to the continuation of a system that allows publishing houses to act as toll keepers to the dissemination of knowledge that unlimited copyright gives them. Yes, this system serves publisher's business models well. However, the larger public interest in seeing less restrictions on access to scientific publication is much less well served. The business model in this case is based on the notion that profits can be maximized by relying on the exclusivity granted by the copyrights process. It becomes obsolete, if authors refuse to play by these rules (but, yes, you're right, it also becomes much less valuable to those who see it as a mechanism for making money).
You talk about what sacrifice does MIT faculty make? First of all, not all sacrifice can be measured in monetary terms. Not everyone monetarizes every action or principle they have. Your question fails to address the cost to MIT faculty of not having their work more widely appreciated by the "peers", ie. a larger public who might, if they took the time to become sufficiently literate in the subject at hand to understand the notation and ideas contained therein.
What you fail to address in your post is why should publishers be able use exclusive copyrights that allow them to act as toll collectors on the road to public knowledge. Sure it benefits a particular business model, you say is never obsolete. However, is supporting the publishers monopoly on access via the copyright process actually the best way to provide the greatest public good? In the age of the internet and online publication, the answer seems to be that there ought to be less restrictive mechanisms for the public to gain access to knowledge and by less restrictive, we are often talking about less costly since often it is cost that determines who will be able to gain access to "published" knowledge and who won't. It also bears on whether such a model is really the best way to strengthen the infrastructure of science and science education.
My view is that this issue is much larger and actually is about who gets to set the agenda with regard to the dissemination of knowledge and to a large extent what directions that agenda can take by virtue of what points of view get broad discussion.
I think today's presidential "news conference", which took place on line is a good example of the larger issue. Obama has concluded, and I think reasonably so given the desire of traditional media to manipulate coverage for their own purposes, that it is time to use new online technologies to broaden the public of which issues of importance to the body politic get discussed and how they get discussed. The traditional media no longer have an exclusive hold on what or how the news will be covered. Now the public has a mechanism to raise their own voice in this regard, both as to what the agenda should be and who should set it.
Some in this thread have wondered whether Science or Nature could survive. From the perspective of the science, it doesn't really matter. The stature of these publications does not lie in their ability to control what is the best science, but rather in the inherent peer review process that scientists themselves place around such publications. If scientist submitted the same papers in an open/forum style of publishing and those same papers receive the same level of scientific review (and lets face it, such review is not uniformly always stellar), the prestige and status of such publications would
gravitate elsewhere, as it should.
The issue is also much broader in that i
What business model? You mean not paying the writers, who are backed by schools, charging the subscribers ridiculous prices, which are mostly schools, and charging for internet access, where the primary customers are schools? Then they want the copyright as well? Ever wonder why college is so expensive?
Ya, I'd say that business model isn't outdated ... just sound a bit eh... greedy?
Paying for editorial services for scientific journals is hardly a widespread practice. I personally know of no such instances, although I once kindly received a free copy of a book from UC Berkeley Press for reviewing a very large monograph. In fact, scientific integrity would argue against such a practice. Unfortunately, good science can't be outsourced.
This may certainly be true for book publication and for non-scientific disciplines involving peer-review.
With regard to all those who do all this thankless, time-consuming, hard work, welcome to the world of science and scientific review.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. ... IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works.
I have an idea for this. I sometimes hang out on this website where lots of people are submitting things to be published. I don't feel like reading all of the submissions, but the great part is that other users can score up some of the submitted content so I can filter through the chaff and just look at the stuff that is most likely interesting or worthwhile. And I can just go to subsections of content that I'm primarily interested in. Then - and this is the cool part - every submission is debated in a moderated, open forum - where again, I can filter through the comments using a number of criteria and read only the "top rated" information, if I so choose.
I think the website is called slashdot. Have you ever checked out how it works?
Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I would argue that without name-brand journals, name recognition will rely on more realistic metrics (like the quality of the work, not necessarily where stuff gets published) and therefore may be a better measure than the current system.
CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
The prestige comes from such journals having a good track record for producing good science and the development of a web of reviewers around such publication outlets. Broadening the number of such outlets only increases the competition not the quality of the science in either the "prestigious" or "non prestigious" journals.
Scientists gravitate to publishing in certain journals to increase the visibility of their work, the relevancy of the journal to the topic at hand, and the opportunities they provide to interact with other similarly minded scientists, who they view as making important contributions to the science at hand, so as to improve their chances at funding. The same is true for their gravitation to particular institutions (not to mention the payscales).
If there were more open journals seeking readers, it would only serve to focus the attention of scientists to communities of scientists they perceive as providing the best opportunities to advance their work. This should be something controlled by the scientific community itself, not through what essentially amounts to abuse of the copyright process. Open publication might actually force the media and policy makers to focus on what really constitutes good science rather than simply looking to a narrow spectrum of science published in a few journals as a proxy for the scientific process.
By taking some of the money out of the publication process that the large publishing houses have been able to extract for the "toll" of publishing, those funds can be better directed back toward the community of scientists themselves rather than allowing it to be placed in hands of those whose agendas that are not necessarily the same as the scientific community.
Does this include the MIT Press Journals e.g. Presence http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres?
Whether or not editors get paid varies based on the discipline as well as the journal. In my area (mathematics) a few journals may pay editors, but most do not. Editors, just like referees, work voluntarily; except that editors get the prestige of having their name associated with a well-known journal.
Also, I think you vastly overestimate the cost of running a journal. In math there have been a few cases of mass resignations of editorial boards (essentially killing the journal), and a brand-new journal springing up to take its place. Remarkably, these new journals that are basically equivalent to the old ones manage to charge 5 or 10 (!) times less to get the same job done.
Journal prices have been rising out of proportion with actual publishing costs for a long time now.
Which also means that if the journal in question has turned into an echo chamber or more simply isn't sufficiently open to new ideas then good, new but different research is overlooked because it doesn't meet the current criteria for "good, new research". Which means we have to find it ourselves, rely on the reviews and recommendations of others at open access sites or both.
I'm not ready to scrap the peer-review publication process but the current system allowing the journal publishers to retain exclusive control of publication of the research for what often amounts to the life of the copyright is too high a price to pay for their services. Open Access requirements are a case of the pendulum swinging the opposite way to correct a situation in which too much of the value of research publication had accreted to the benefit of publishers.
We'll eventually find our way back to a middle ground that will likely look a lot like what NIH require. And that will be good for all of us.
I don't see how any of this means that the peer-review process, or the prestige associated with certain journals over others, has to end. Could you explain how you got from point A to point B?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
This is not about getting rid of the stamp of being published in a peer reviewed journal; it's about making sure MIT has a copy of the peer reviewed papers stored in its own Institutional Repository.
Some journals allow this (check out a list at http://www.doaj.org/). Many, especially the more established high ranking journals owned by large publishing operations, don't for fear of losing expensive subscriptions from libraries. Libraries have seen huge increases in the cost of journals as the publishers (who have seen the writing on the wall) seek to make money while they can.
This announcement along with the similar decisions by several funding bodies is all about forcing the publishers to change business model and accept papers without exclusive copyright transfer (or face not being able to publish papers from MIT, or research supported by the Welcome, NIH, etc.). If enough others join in then the fraction of research output covered will be too high for closed access journals to do without.
Models to fund open journals usually involve some number of:
- don't produce a printed version, online only
- automate as much of the peer review co-ordination process as possible to keep costs low (peer review and editorial boards are generally unpaid even at traditional journals)
- charge costs to the submitter (usually only charge those at established institutions in developed countries so submissions from less traditional routes are not blocked). Note many closed-access journal also charge, sometimes for bizarre things like a colour figure charge even for online-only material.
- rely on more volunteer effort in running managing the journal
"Open access" != "posted on Arxiv by any yahoo". There is nothing in the MIT policy which will discourage peer review or any of the other traditional means of evaluating the quality of papers.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
One word: LIBRARY.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Currently, that is the case because the print journals have not been fully replaced. At some point I can see that the filtering being done now by formal peer review might be replaced by a less formal peer review consisting of links to relevant articles and such.
There's also a high probability that as print journals cease to be the one and only way to get published, they'll start offering better deals or morph into a less expensive online publication community. That is, they'll jettison the parts that make little sense like the physical printing and delivery and keep the worthwhile parts like editing and peer review.
I disagree most strongly. Right now
I can only access publications that are either available freely online or present in the (very limited) selection in the library in my organization. Very often publications that are 20-30 years old are still unavailable unless you pay a rather large fee to the journal and my library only carries the journals in the field, nothing from the other disciplines. This is very detrimental to research when I cannot access information from a different, but in some way related area.