There's be quite some talk about Open Access across the internet recently, largely thanks to the acceptance of the Finch Report, making it a requirement that the results of publicly-funded research be freely available to the public. This seems like such a obviously correct thing that it might come as a surprise to many that it is not already the case. On the other hand, it often seems like much science research is just a scheme to turn public money into private enterprise, so perhaps there should be no surprise.
On top of this, European grant funders are doing the same, as I tweeted recently from the Euroscience Open Forum in Dublin last week, during a talk from Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the current European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.
In a way, though, it's all a bit disappointing. Currently publicly-funded scientists perform research, write it up in the form of a paper and send it off to an academic journal. The journal editor, or editorial team, will arrange for peer-review (done at (usually) public expense, as an unpaid favour by other scientists), and if the peer-review is successful the journal will publish it. Then they will charge the scientist's (or scientists') institute thousands of pounds to buy the article back in the form of a journal subscription. It's this subscription cost that the new policy will seek to change in some form or other, and they have done it not by challenging the whole system, but by encouraging, or mandating that authors pay to have their articles made open access (which many journals allow). Typically, most journals currently charge of the order of a couple of thousand pounds to do this. Many of the blog posts and twitter comments worrying about the new announcement have concentrated on this part - that pushing the cost to the author rather than the reader is no help. Those comments are probably right.
To my mind, the better solution would be to dispense with traditional journals and do something along the lines of Peter Coles's suggestion for an electronic open-access journal that would be rather cheap to run. There are already other examples around, such as the wonderful Journal of Integer Sequences, and the major stumbling block, judging by comments I've seen, is that employers and potential employers currently put much stock in the impact factor of where a scientist has published, and people not already somewhere high up the ladder will want to do what gets them jobs. Clearly, in a sane world the employers would judge the merits of the science, rather than just look up the impact factor of the journal. If the UK government wants to be bold and iconoclastic in its support of open access, it should rather ask for all REF outputs to be presented to the panels scrubbed of their publication details and outlaw the use of bibliometrics as a proxy for judging scientific merit. It make make the REF more expensive to run, but changing the open access model would overall make science cheaper to fund.
Of all that's been written or spoken about this issue (and I attended a couple of sessions at ESOF2012 about this) the only one that really makes me think twice is the fact that many learned societies depend somewhat on income from journal publishing. In my area, the UK Institute of Physics and the US American Physical Society publish good journals, to which I send most of my papers at present. They are generally good guys in my mind; their journals are priced pretty reasonably, and the IoP even make all their articles free to read for a month on publication, and I do appreciate that the current model for publishing is somewhat expensive. I slightly worry for these good institutions if the traditional journal is on the way out, but it's not a strong enough argument to retain the old model, for me.
On top of this, European grant funders are doing the same, as I tweeted recently from the Euroscience Open Forum in Dublin last week, during a talk from Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the current European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.
In a way, though, it's all a bit disappointing. Currently publicly-funded scientists perform research, write it up in the form of a paper and send it off to an academic journal. The journal editor, or editorial team, will arrange for peer-review (done at (usually) public expense, as an unpaid favour by other scientists), and if the peer-review is successful the journal will publish it. Then they will charge the scientist's (or scientists') institute thousands of pounds to buy the article back in the form of a journal subscription. It's this subscription cost that the new policy will seek to change in some form or other, and they have done it not by challenging the whole system, but by encouraging, or mandating that authors pay to have their articles made open access (which many journals allow). Typically, most journals currently charge of the order of a couple of thousand pounds to do this. Many of the blog posts and twitter comments worrying about the new announcement have concentrated on this part - that pushing the cost to the author rather than the reader is no help. Those comments are probably right.
To my mind, the better solution would be to dispense with traditional journals and do something along the lines of Peter Coles's suggestion for an electronic open-access journal that would be rather cheap to run. There are already other examples around, such as the wonderful Journal of Integer Sequences, and the major stumbling block, judging by comments I've seen, is that employers and potential employers currently put much stock in the impact factor of where a scientist has published, and people not already somewhere high up the ladder will want to do what gets them jobs. Clearly, in a sane world the employers would judge the merits of the science, rather than just look up the impact factor of the journal. If the UK government wants to be bold and iconoclastic in its support of open access, it should rather ask for all REF outputs to be presented to the panels scrubbed of their publication details and outlaw the use of bibliometrics as a proxy for judging scientific merit. It make make the REF more expensive to run, but changing the open access model would overall make science cheaper to fund.
Of all that's been written or spoken about this issue (and I attended a couple of sessions at ESOF2012 about this) the only one that really makes me think twice is the fact that many learned societies depend somewhat on income from journal publishing. In my area, the UK Institute of Physics and the US American Physical Society publish good journals, to which I send most of my papers at present. They are generally good guys in my mind; their journals are priced pretty reasonably, and the IoP even make all their articles free to read for a month on publication, and I do appreciate that the current model for publishing is somewhat expensive. I slightly worry for these good institutions if the traditional journal is on the way out, but it's not a strong enough argument to retain the old model, for me.
Thanks for the interesting post Paul. Experimentation with journal approaches is a constructive approach and the more the merrier I think: gives the community choice. Mandates, however, are quite different and (as you mention) could stifle individual journals and societies etc. Publishers bring a lot to bear in investment, management and infrastructure just needed to keep good journals ticking over. Disclosure: I am a medical journals publisher for Elsevier in Oxford, UK.
ReplyDeleteHi Andrew,
DeleteThanks for the comment. It'll be interesting to see how things pan out, especially with the new mandates. I haven't done a terribly exhaustive search, but my guess is that not really much will change as a a large number of journals, in least in my field (and all Elsevier journals?) allow so-called "green" access anyway.
Paul, you'll be happy to note that Physical Review (the APS journals) are provided for free to high schools and public libraries.
ReplyDeleteYes, that is indeed good. It would be nice if they could find a way to make that work globally (or do they already?)
DeleteThey participate in some initiatives that allow researchers in "developing countries" free access to articles, at least.
DeleteI'm glad someone has finally mentioned this sort of alternative!
ReplyDeleteI've noticed a lot of press suggesting that the only way to publish a journal is to charge the reader or the writer; given the vast swathes of resources on the Internet that offer completely free content this just seems to me to be a slightly ridiculous premise. Something that is often overlooked by the proponents on both sides is the distinction between an Open-Access *print* journal and an *electronic* journal. The latter presumably has significantly lower costs than the former; perhaps this lack of distinction is where some of the argument spawns from(?). I'd hardly expect anyone to print free bound copies of a 1000 page journal volume for anyone that asks, but why are Publishers trying to charge everyone $30 each for a duplicated pdf file?
The costs of peer review are often cited against Open-Access, but like you say this cost seems to be incurred by the publisher, and the actual work (done by the reviewers) is largely done on 'good will'.
I gather that Academic Publishing is an enormously lucrative business, and it seems that (as pointed out by Andrew Miller) Publishers are throwing their weight around to protect their own interests rather than the interest of Science at large. This is largely a sensible response, but something has to give at some point...
That's my (rather unstructured) bag of thoughts on the topic...
Re COD's query about value a publisher adds, you might find the following link of interest: there is a huge amount of invisible infrastructure and management needed to make good journals actually happen, and yes it generally does need 1000s of staff and robust, expensive systems.
Deletehttp://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/07/18/a-proposed-list-60-things-journal-publishers-do/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScholarlyKitchen+%28The+Scholarly+Kitchen%29
On the other hand, and in COD's defence, a large part of those "60 Things" are in fact to do with protecting a *business* - COD's point was about what might happen if you remove the overheads relating to the business side of the publishing (in theory this is possible, though the practical hurdles are large to say the least).
DeleteIf you were to counter that such a drastic change would require a massive overhaul of both the political and scientific will and framework for publication, I would agree.
However, I believe that COD is arguing for such a huge change - the essence of the argument being "it makes more sense from a public-good viewpoint, so everyone should contribute". While this is ambitious, I don't think we should rule out the idea based on difficulty alone.
Furthermore, I might point out that in the comments section below the link you provided, there is a healthy debate as to whether all of the "services" provided by a journal are even relevant services to the scientists. Even if many of them are needed at all.
DeleteThis would seem to back up my and COD's implicit assertion that it is not necessarily such a stretch for OA journals that are non-profit and do not charge the relatively large fees which are characteristic of OA journals such as PLoS ONE.
However, I admit that there is a debate over the issue which does not seem to be settled - and likely will not be until somebody goes ahead and does it.
Impact factor? Anyone who rates papers more highly because they appeared in a journal with a high impact factor (i.e. high average citation rate) doesn't know what he is doing, or has a hidden agenda or an axe to grind. Surely, the impact of the papers of the author in question is what matters, so just count the citations to these papers. (It has been shown that most of the impact from high--impact-factor journals come from just a few papers; most papers in these journals don't have many citations.) The only problem with going away from traditional journals is for young people who don't have many citations at all, so in these cases the fact that they published in a journal with high standards is important.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more about rating papers more highly just because they are in journals with high impact factors. I don't doubt that it happens, though, which is why I suggested that the REF panel be given "blind" view of the science and no details of the journals. But yes, the whole dispensing of the current way of doing things would need a method to let young researchers be able to advance their careers by merit.
DeleteI understand that the modal number of citations of papers is zero. It's certainly true for my papers :-) (of course it's a slightly silly statistic. There are a lot of possible numbers out there)