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Faculty Votes For Open Access Policy At UC San Francisco
Marian the Librarian writes "UCSF is among the first public institutions to adopt an open access policy, and is the largest scientific institution to have such a policy. The policy, voted unanimously by the faculty, will allow UCSF authors to put electronic versions of their published scientific articles on an open access repository making their research findings freely available to the public. Dr. Richard A. Schneider, who led the initiative, said, 'Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals. The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research.'"
Yes, but without journals, how will we per-judge the quality of others' work? This may sound facetious, but it's not. Any fool can write a journal article, and many fools can write compelling article. A journal offers getting and review by members in the field. How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?
no, the internet has made this question more relevant than ever. In a time of free and rapid dissemination of information, how can we judge the validity of that information. This is especially important if you're going to suggest supplanting a peer reviewed journal with open access. I await your answer!
Want to guess who does the actual "peer reviewing"? You know... who judges the validity of published information and analysis...
Hint: it's not publishers.
It's the scientists themselves. And they do it without any type of monetary compensation (i.e. for free/gratis).
Scientists do the work.
(Other) scientists review the work.
Publishers only do typesetting, rip-off scientists of their intellectual property right and little more than that.
On the other hand... taxpayers ALREADY have to pay scientists to do research, already have to pay for scientists to spend their time doing peer-review, already have to give money to libraries so they can pay the publishers for their subscriptions (i.e. access to the research that was already funded by taxpayers to begin with). And... yeah... if they want to access that research that was bought and paid for them, guess what? THEY HAVE TO PAY YET AGAIN.
Here's a crazy idea... take all the money that universities and libraries pay to publishers worldwide and use it to enable "open access initiatives" to have the required tools and expertise (mostly at the level of typesetting, since everything else is already covered by scientists anyway) for preparation and free dissemination of high-quality publications.
Meanwhile... in the real world... current (i.e. already existing) open access journals are ALREADY some of the most reputed venues for scientific publication (e.g. "BMC Genomics"). So... yeah, no need to refute you when Reality already does it for me.
Please... do tell... in what way does the "open access" model (as opposed to the "pay-wall" model of scientific publishing) prevent scientists from doing what they already are doing for free (i.e. peer-review)? I await your answer!