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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."
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?
Yes, they did. Accuweather had their pet senator Santorum(yes, he's good for more than bizarre comments about homosexuals) sponsor S.768. This would have forbidden the NOAA from providing publicly funded data to the public.
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.
The vote was unanimous at the March 18th faculty meeting: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/open-access-0320.html
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?
While all of that is technically true, I was under the impression that in almost no circumstances are academic journal editors or reviewers paid for their work. Rather, to sit on the editorial board of a prestigious journal is considered its own reward.
From what I have heard, even the publishers don't present it that way. Publishers (Blackwell Synergy, Wiley, ScienceDirect, etc.) aren't editors. Editors are academics. The publishers argue that journal costs pay for the actual cost of distribution, as well as the cost of organizing all the editors, reviewers, etc.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson