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.'"

Re:Good, now...

[noh8rz3]

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?

Re:Good, now...

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, I think the solution lies in cryptography (disclaimer: I am a grad student doing research in cryptography). You need a system where researchers in a field could apply digital signatures to papers, but with a twist: the reviewers should remain anonymous after applying those signatures. This is not an impossible task; it is called a "group signature." The idea is that universities/researchers would cooperate to bring peer reviewers together, and those reviewers would be given group signature keys that they would apply to the papers they review. A person reading a paper could verify the signatures, which would tell them which consortium of universities/researchers organized the review process for that paper.

Like journals, the groups of reviewers could be organized on a per-month basis, and the names the whole group would be published -- with only a fraction actually reviewing any particular paper. It is not a complete break from journals as a system, it is just a way to use computers and the Internet to publish instead of relying on the old publishing companies; the way researchers communicate with each other has changed, and publishing articles should change too.

Re:Good, now...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not reviewing, the problem is gaining sufficient reputation.

You see, the internet replaces the distribution mechanism. It does not replace the reviewing process. So that we keep that as (as topic starter said) the way we already did it -- by academics, unpaid. Whether this is distributed electronically or on dead trees does not matter. The label that is on the distribution matters -- that is the seal of quality.
To generate a new seal of quality, we'll have to start from square one: building reputation.
After a steady flow of not publishing crap, reputation will be garnered. Even better, if some respected researchers use open access works as venues for their hot new stuff, then citation count will increase drastically, attention will be gained, and the whole process will be sped up.

But yeah, this won't happen overnight. That's no need to start though -- even a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step and all.

Effect on Promotion and Tenure

[cortex]

Most researchers will think about this for about 2 seconds and then publish in the journal with the most prestige and highest impact factor that they can. Publishing in high impact journals is a major factor in promotion and tenure for professors, so until universities adapt their policies on promotion and tenure, professors will continue to published in prestigious and expensive closed access journals. When reviewing someone for promotion or tenure, high-level administrators don't have time to read all the journal articles a professor has published, so they really heavily on g-indices and/or h-indices that are based upon journal impact factor scores.