Nature Debate on Open Scientific Journals 215
Declan Butler writes "I thought I'd let you know that the journal Nature is currently running an online special on the debate over access to the electronic scientific literature. It will be updated with two to three new articles each week, and will run until around mid-May. 'The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish. New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user. This ongoing web focus will explore current trends and future possibilities.' Best, Declan Butler, European correspondent, Nature"
a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that Scientific journals should take a cue for the mistakes of the music industry and embrace the abilities of new technology. By moving from paper magazines to web-published journals they can cut distribution costs enormously, hopefully to the levels where they can survive on ads (or other non-subscription means) alone. Also, unlike the music industry there's none of this controversy over file-sharing and authors not getting paid.
Re:a good start (Score:2)
Re:a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I like the idea of having authors pay to have their work accepted. Underfunded studies/authors may not be able to afford submissions. That would lead to less exposure, and increasing obscurity. Of course, this is me not knowing the exact details of how much it would cost for a submission, but I guess it would have to be substantial in order to foot the bill for their journal in the first place.
Re:a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why journals charge so much for subscriptions. After all the reviewers do their work for free, so their only expense is the editorial stuff and printing. These are expensive but not expensive enough to justify the exorbitatn subscription charges.
Why they charge so much (Score:2)
Re:Why they charge so much (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually that is not quite right. They did a study in math journals and found out that top quality journals with similar readership (e.g. Inventiones and the Annals) charge wildly different subscriptions.
Not all journals are equal (Score:2)
Re:Not all journals are equal (Score:2)
Yes, yes, milking the readership is what much of it is about... And usually they take the copyright too.
Re:a good start (Score:2, Informative)
Re:a good start (Score:3, Insightful)
Scientific Journals are expected to keep archives of their works for hundreds of years, and put a lot of effort into making sure there is no way that past issues will be lost. Commercial magazines certainly prefer to have records of old issues, but it is not as devastating to them if archiving fails.
Because government money go
Not a good objection (Score:2)
What isn't trivial, as you bring up, is the cost of journals -- a decent university library will literally spend a million dollars or more a year to subscribe to all the journals they need. The simple fact is author-p
Re:Not a good objection (Score:2)
Although this type of scenario illustrates how the price of author-pays publication might discourage non-mainstream research more, this is no
Re:Not a good objection (Score:3, Insightful)
I now work in a University and have easy access to all the information I could possibly want. I should have no problem publishing work under an author pays model either, although I haven't tried yet.
However, before I started working here, I worked in industry. Getting access to scientific journals was harder than catching moonbeams. The best data we could get came from google and citeseer. Even
Re:a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:a good start (Score:2)
That is not the case for most journals, as far as I know. However authors often have to pay for color illustrations.
Re:a good start (Score:5, Informative)
Example:
Electronic manuscripts: $120.00 per page
Paper manuscripts: $150 per page
Color figures: $600.00 for first figure, $150.00 for each additional color figure
You're looking at ~$1000 minimum for a typical paper.
Re:a good start (Score:2)
Interesting. Are you in biology? In CS people typically don't have to pay.
Re:a good start (Score:2, Informative)
Re:a good start (Score:2)
So what do researchers without grants do?
Re:a good start (Score:2)
$1,500 for a paper is very reasonable, especially as the author would retain copyright.
Re:a good start (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in materials science, and most of the journals I've published in, that page charges are optional. They request it, and many scientific grants have a line item for it, but whether or not you pay does not affect publication. The notable exception to this, however, is for color figures in the paper version, where the charges appear to be mandatory.
And this is as it should be. Science should be about the objective and rational search for truth. Cold-hearted, even. When you start bringing money into that equation, you're just going to mess it up.
Which is why I don't think open-source journals are ever going to work. If they can keep the page charges optional, and still make enough money to keep afloat, then it might.
A large portion of the reason why is that the people that actually *use* these journals (researchers, students, etc.), at least in the academic world, are insulated from their cost. A journal might be free, or it might cost a bundle and I would never know. I'll use the best journals I have access to for my research, and I'll publish in the best one's I can, cost of the journal be dammned.
Re:a good start (Score:2)
Also, AFAIK, it still costs money for the author to publish in many journals. But the subject matter is not subsequently free for all to read. But in the old days the authors would usually get a stack of preprints, and send these to various colleagues upon request.
Re:a good start (Score:3, Informative)
Re:a good start (Score:2)
It is not about institutions, but individual researchers. Your institution typically will not cover the cost.
Re:a good start (Score:5, Informative)
This paper entitled, "Viagra causes withered genitals," is brought to you by the makers of Cialis.
Better yet, there were two separate instances at the University of Toronto where two separate researchers were pressured into suppressing their research when it was unfavorable to one of the university's sponsors. The investigator in one case was Dr. Nancy Olivieri [www.caut.ca], who faced a possible lawsuit and discipline when she spoke out against Apotex; the other one involved Dr. David Healey [eye.net], who had a job offer rescinded when he spoke against Prozac.
So what's left? Author-pay, government-pay and donation-based systems all have disadvantages.
Well put (Score:2)
Re:Well put (Score:2)
Sagan's role wasn't just as a scientific entertainer. That's why your film analogy is flawed. He tried to teach people to think skeptically and to recognise the wonderful world and universe we live in without resorting to fringe-dwelling nuttiness, religion, or whatever.
I know, there is a capitalist argument here: if there
Re:Well put (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:a good start (Score:3, Informative)
Re:a good start (Score:2)
Open access publishers quickly rebutted [scidev.net] the claim.
academic library (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:academic library (Score:5, Informative)
It goes down to the "communication" pillar of the Scientific Method.
Take our 400+ publications, for example. The're searchable online, but are in a database. Which means they don't show up on google.
Most of them are old, but in this field (fluid mechanics) a "recent" article may be in the mid 80's. I worked on one this morning which has sources from 1911 fluid mechanics work. Most of the cutting edge stuff just happened back in the mid 80's, and now, a few other groups are starting up again with this area.
Now, unless you either:
1. have an ip address at a school with a subscription
2. have a subsctiption yourself
3. have a catalouge, or a print out of all the journals AND have lots of time...
You will have a hard time getting at the bulk of the information availble in these types of fields. Take Chemical Engineering for example. Other than major applications and some computer simulations, little has changes since like the 70's. This means that you have to go to old print journals to get comparitively cutting edge stuff in some cases.
This article is right up there with making the descision of "profit or communication, or both."
By the way, we'll have all out publications indices up where google will be able to find them soon. And we have a policy for passing out reprints upon request, if we can.
Re:academic library (Score:2)
I thought fluids was still a relatively fresh field with the recent research of 'complex fluids'. I've even seen several colloquiums and lectures in the condensed matter group of the physics department here at JHU on such fluids.
Re:academic library (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize I'm a minority, but there are plenty of high school kids who are interested in science that would love to have access to this type of stuff.
Re:academic library (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Someone is paying for these subscriptions, even if it is not the individual researcher. This is the university or research institute. This money comes from: overhead on grants (your tax dollars), student fees (your tuition), and perhaps some general donations fund (money that could otherwise fund more research or improve facilities). Free to you doesn't reall
Re:academic library (Score:4, Informative)
This is starting to change in computer science, although other fields are a long way behind. I'm studying for a PhD at the moment, and most of the papers I need are available online, either on the authors' websites or on Citeseer [psu.edu]. Even in CS, older papers are less likely to be available, but most of the work in my area was published in the last four years or is still awaiting publication. That's the other advantage of publishing online - the process of getting a paper reviewed and published can take years, so in fast-moving fields the journals are really an archive of significant work rather than a news medium. To keep up with recent work you have to look online.
Of course, the problem with self-publication is lack of peer review. However, Citeseer does a pretty good job of finding significant papers based on the number of citations (think Pagerank), and the database of citations also helps you to find papers that might contradict or reinforce the conclusions of the paper you've just read. This makes it less important to have editors filtering out biased or unreproducible results.
I hope that authors in other fields will start to embrace online self-publication. Unfortunately, many institutions see publication count as a good measure of an academic's standing, partly because the peer review process tends to ensure that a frequently-published author is well respected in his or her field. If insitutions started to pay attention to citation count instead, self-publication would become a viable alternative to journal publication, saving students and taxpayers an awful lot of money.
Re:academic library (Score:2)
I never violate copyright by putting journal articles on the web. On the other hand, I am elated when I find that some article I need has been put up on the web illegally by someone else, thereby saving mea trip to a library with a bag of quarters for the copier.
New business models? (Score:5, Funny)
Might cause information overload (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, I think they would still need a subscription service to pay for the bandwidth, storage, and personnel to maintain an 'open' site.
The debate should definately be interesting and full of both great and harebrained ideas.
Re:Might cause information overload (Score:5, Interesting)
that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing,
Absolutely.
For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.
So what's the equivalent?
Papers get digitally signed by their authors.
Then, as an author accumulates a good reputation because of his published work, other authors will seek to have him review and put his stamp of approval onto their papers. [This is a lot like getting well known scientists to become editors of a dead-tree journal].
To put in /. terms, it would be a more refined moderation system, so that you could see where the mod points came from (a +3 from some new friends of gnaa or goatse posters would not be as valuable as a +1 moderation from the real Bruce Perens or Alan Cox, for example.)
Re:Might cause information overload (Score:2)
In any decent journal, ALL articles have been reviewed by experts in the field, the experts have commented and suggested changes, and the authors changed their papers accordingly. This is the peer-review system, and it's basically the whole reason scientific journals exist. The actual paper (or online, these days) publication is probably about only half the work.
Re:Might cause information overload (Score:2)
The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.
The horse has already left the barn on this one. Tenure processes in many academic departments essentially dictate a heavy publishing record, which is not necessarily synonymous with publishing quality.
I appreciate that some reviewers would feel hesitant to give a brutally honest assessment of an article if they weren't guaranteed anonymity (let's just assume competitors abusing anonymity to pan articles of colleagues that compete for the sa
Public grants = free publication (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't want everyone to read your article, don't accept government funds. If you don't want to give your journal away for free, don't publish publicly-funded research.
Now, let's imagine a world in which corporate tax breaks were considered public funding...
Re:Public grants = free publication (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the research is classified...
Re:Public grants = free publication (Score:3, Insightful)
If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.
You've totally missed the distinction between making research freely accessible to the taxpayer, and publishing the research in a paid-subscription journal. All of my taxpayer-funded research papers are available from my website; however, in order to ensure that my research is widely disseminated, I also choose to hav
Re:Public grants = free publication (Score:3, Informative)
We don't care who has access to our information, but we do care that the journals are preventing access to information we released to the world.
A large group of scientist believe that all researchers should have access, at least in electronic form, to a
Re:Public grants = free publication (Score:2)
I just recently came across an example of a paper written by a government agency, but can't find it at the moment. At the bottom of the title page, it had a disclaimer that read, "Work done by the US government. Work is in the public domain," or something to that effect.
I agree that work done BY THE GOVERNMENT s
farming subsidies = free food (Score:2)
Authors Pay, Readers for Free? (Score:2, Insightful)
From what I've read of several of the articles, readers would pay for the value of the content. In one case, and only for not-for-profit,
Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free? (Score:2)
Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free? (Score:4, Informative)
The universities have usually paid three times for an article in a journal to which they subscribe, with salary, grants, and subscriptions.
A thought. (Score:2)
One must also remember that these journals are the prevailing vehicle for viable discourse for the scientific community. A move towards Open Access would benefit the community; the idea is to increase access to the information, not lower the cost of submission.
Besides, doctors can afford to pay for publis
Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free? (Score:3, Interesting)
A portion of every scientific grant is reserved to pay the publishing fees. For journals like Science, Nature, PNAS this is about $600 per article and color illustrations up the cost.
So, scientists already pay to publish their work. Similarly in the humanities a large number of PhD theses are published by what are effectively "vanity presses", s
Money talks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Money talks? (Score:2)
They are open and believe me, the scientist pays (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They are open and believe me, the scientist pay (Score:2, Interesting)
Really? Do *you* know any universities with a library near West Plains, Missouri?
Things change, not for the better (Score:3, Insightful)
It is becoming more and more common for university libraries to avoid paying for the increasingly expensive and increasingly numerous journals by opting for electronic only access to the journals.
These electronic licenses usually come with strict requirements by the journal companies that only university members can access the journal content. ie, if you don't have a student/employee ID and a computer account, you can't rea
Publishing in Journals (Score:4, Insightful)
The best thing about scientific journals is that within each discipline, there are journals that carry more weight than others. These are journals that are harder to get published in. By limiting the amount of information they publish, they're telling the reader that, "this information was important enough that we, a high-profile journal, felt it was worth publishing." If these journals switched to an author-pays method of publishing, my fear is that this filter would be turned off, as money tends to do.
"Here's $50,000, publish my article, even though it's based on bad data and is in fact a near-copy of something published years ago."
The best journals require peer reviewing of any submitted articles before they are accepted, and these peers are generally people working in not only the same field but in the same area as the submitter. These are the people most likely to know if the data presented makes sense, could happen, has been published before, etc.
I guess my fear is just that allowing authors to pay for articles to get published opens up a new area of question in terms of an article's weight. No longer will you have to only look at the journal to know if the material is worth reading, but you'll have to check and see if (and how much) the author paid to have it published.
Having published a couple of articles on chemistry in the past, I would much rather see some other type of method in which information would be free. I just have great doubts about allowing people to buy their way into having more things published (and increasing their publication list)
Re:Publishing in Journals (Score:3, Informative)
Authors already do pay to publish in scientific journals. In my own field the biggest journal (Astrophysical Journal, or as we called it ApJ) can cost up to $165 a page. See here:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/pcharges_t
Re:Publishing in Journals (Score:2)
Authors already do pay to publish in scientific journals. In my own field the biggest journal (Astrophysical Journal, or as we called it ApJ) can cost up to $165 a page.
...which is why I almost-universally publish in Monthly Notices [blackwellpublishing.com]. They don't have page charges, unless a paper needs colour; and even in that case, the expense is pretty low (400 pounds sterling for the whole paper). The fact that both ApJ and A&A have page charges is a major offputting factor for me.
Re:Publishing in Journals (Score:5, Interesting)
Nature and Science are amongst the worst, charging prices for their online access that are so high, that most german university libraries have cancelled their online access as protest. Great working conditions, I can tell you..
Open scientific literature is a great idea, but it has to be done consequently. Cut out the publishing houses completely, organize peer review as a network of individual scientists. The big journals have long overdone their ripping of of the public.
Re:Publishing in Journals (Score:2)
Are you sure? I don't have the latest numbers at my fingertips, but Nature and Science are pretty cheap. In 2002, Nature was $US845/year, and Science was US$390/year for the institutional rates, which are among the lowest in the industry.
Re:Publishing in Journals (Score:2, Informative)
For an academic institution the price for Nature is based on the full FTE figure for all staff, students and researchers. Please provide details to your sales representative.
Which would, according to our librarians, amount to about 20.000 Euro/year for our university. A sum we simply cannot afford - mostly due to the horrible research funding in Germany. But don't get me started on this topic...
Re:Publishing in Journals (Score:2)
Besides, th
Re:PLoS (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of Open Access is not about publishing whatever you want for a fee. It is about having access to the journals that are already published. Both PLoS (Public Library of Science) and Nature are peer reviewed by respected scientists of their field. Both charge fees to author to submit/layout their papers. But the difference is that access to PLoS is free and unrestricted, wher
wired article (Score:3, Informative)
open source in other arenas (than software) [wired.com] scroll to bottom to see beginning paragraph on the section about 'open source' scientific journals.
*shrug*
e.
The preprint archive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The preprint archive (Score:2)
Re:The preprint archive (Score:3, Insightful)
But anyway, as someone else said, there's ALOT to be said for the peer review model. You can see this even at some conferences, where anybody can attend if they pay the registration fee. You basically see science trolls at some of the sessi
Re:The preprint archive (Score:2)
I suppose the important thing is that the speakers themselves are screened. (At least in most cases, and at all
Re:The preprint archive (Score:2)
Re:The preprint archive (Score:2, Insightful)
The philosophy behind these preprint servers actually closely mirrors the open source philosophy. When I want to publish something, I post it for everyone to see on arxiv. Then over the course of a few weeks, I get tremendous feedback. It tends to be constructive, since it's obvious who
Good for everyone (Score:3, Interesting)
Journals Need To Open (Score:5, Informative)
Now that I'm in a small Biotech the issues are very apparent. Many scientific journals, that we absolutely need, cost more then $1000 each for a years subscription. If you only new how many different journals we need. With start up monies of less then $500k and insane prices on lab equipment and supplies we need every break we can get. If we didn't already have an "alternate"(in other words shady) method of literature acquisition we would be screwed.
While it is true you can find just about any journal in some library - good f-ing luck finding one with everything you need. I hope that a solution can be worked out. Many researchers could benefit from an environment were the data/methods/protocols they need are just a few clicks away - instead of a 4 hour drive or expensive contract away.
Re:Journals Need To Open (Score:2)
Indeed. To maintain a well-stocked library at a modern comprehensive university requires literally tens of thousands of subscriptions. The University of Toronto has the second-largest library collection in North America, after Harvard University. In April 2002, their library system received 33409 print serials, and subscribed to 19385 electronic serials. I can only assume that the number of journal subscriptions has increased since then. Incre
Page charges (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not something new. It describes the current situation.
Do a Google search for "page charges" and your favorite discipline. If you want reprints it's even more.
Vanity press and career advancement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vanity press and career advancement (Score:2)
Nope. This isn't a vanity press; your work still needs to be peer-reviewed to be published. If a journal gained a reputation for being soft on authors, its prestige would fall. Scientists publishing in it would receive little professional respect or acknowledgement.
Scientists already rank existing journals both formally and informally based upon the quality of work that they publish. If I apply for a facul
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Leading to the equivalent of Google-spoofing, I presume.
Having open scientific journals is a great idea. (Score:2, Informative)
Scientific publishing and copyright (Score:5, Informative)
It is so obviously in the interests of scientists to have truly open journal access, it is amazing it is taking so long. Especially since many of the top journal publishers are professional scientific societies, ostensibly representing the interests of the scientists.
Times are changing (Score:2)
Re:Times are changing (Score:2)
The other big money-maker is often meetings. These can be expensive, but they seem to get the incentives right. You pay a (fairly large) fee to attend the meeting, and that gives you free access to all the content of the meeting. You pay a (som
Re:Scientific publishing and copyright (Score:2)
I agree. I think the journals with the best systems now are non-profit professional society based, that have page charges for the authors. They are still having trouble fi
Short Circuiting Journals (Score:4, Interesting)
B and M got a Nobel Prize the following year and the field turned into a fevered frenzy in making new discoveries. Once you cracked the concept it was easy to get started which meant that an entire world started at more or less the same starting point.
At this insane tempo nobody had the time to wait for Nature, Science, PhysRevB or the like to run the entire peer review process and (this is the first point I am building up to): much of the publication process was basically short circuited.
People realised that the Berkeley-Stanford environment had an advantage in circulating preprints but it was soon realised it amounted to an unfair advantage. And here is my second point: it was the Physics community that deciced it was unfair and also did something with it.
The result was a zine called High Tc Update [iastate.edu] that listed title and authors of upcoming publications as well as highlights of some submissions. And it was amazingly effective, cutting lead time with months, allowing for an even higher tempo.
So it has been done and can be done and I applaud Nature for staying ahead of the curverather than waiting to be outdated like the music industry.
Profit before truth.. (Score:3, Insightful)
(insert tongue firmly in cheek)
It comes as a great relief to me that scientific truth will soon rest firmly in the hands of the people with the deepest pockets. I can't imagine that special interest groups would *ever* try to take advantage of that kind of system.
publish or perish (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem he addresses is that generally the research and university bureacracy has promoted a ``publish or perish'' mentality, where it's not the quality of work (or how often a work is cited) but how many papers are published that earns a researcher respect (or more earnings, grants, etc.). He illustrates a engineering dean that published on average a paper per week for a one year period. Admittedly, I suspect that most of the papers were actually written by graduate students or post-docs, but it does highlight that how much of that prolific output was new or novel, much less interesting!
Perhaps, going to a author-pays system may have some beneficial side-effects of reducing the amount of cruft that passes for a research paper nowadays. An author would have to balance his need to publish with his resources. Is the content worth it?
I no longer do physics (I'm a software developer now) because I could see the trend that it didn't matter what you wrote, but that you wrote a lot of it. I still toy with the idea of going back and doing some novel research. However, if I do, I intend to publish it on my own website, since I have no need to pad my resume' with a long list of publications, I would just want to get the results out there and indexed by google or other search engines, so anyone who cares and is looking could get instant access to it.
For those who are concerned about this concept of author-pays limiting the exposure of unknown or young researchers, they would have this option available to them also of posting their own work and letting their pool of peers discover them. If their work is truly unique and well done, then their standing will increase.
Re:publish or perish (Score:3, Informative)
The body of human knowledge (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a balance to achieve. Every one part of me would love to have a set of DVDs for purchase (cheap, hopefully) from a web tome of math. It would contain every proof known. At the same time, as a former student I know the value of proving things on your own and the value that comes from that creativity.
What's more scarry though is that a lot of this information simply isn't distributed to enough places. Try to find a copy of the Erdos Selzberg elementry proof of the prime number theorem. It seems like it wouldn't take that much for that knowledge to be lost. More importantly, I think it creates a bad scientific culture. I've never read the elementry proof of the prime number theorem, I know it exists, I believe it has been proven but I can't verify it for myself. You know and this is just math. I think we're getting to the point where all scientific knowledge should be public. Public journals and stuff like that make the most sense and a large internet based repository would be ideal, with some kind of controls, I'd pay a fee for access to it if it was nominal. We're not talking about Hollywood movies and crap like that, we're talking about real knowledge.
As we start to issue policy from science, like the Kyoto treaty, we need to have a real open review process to measure the data, to examine that science actually took place. Not everybody is capable of reading through that kind of data and drawing logical conclusions but an effort has to be made, we've already seen high stakes scientific fraud over the last few years; things that got very public before they were caught and there were only a handful of people that could do the review.
Free Publishing, Moderation, Cheap or Free Viewing (Score:2, Interesting)
The "weeding out" part could be done by researchers who are interested in the latest reports... and if they find the paper is bunk, they can report it, and if they
The problem with scientific journals (Score:3, Insightful)
Helping development (Score:2, Informative)
As more and more journals are appearing online and via searchable databases using a web interface this has allowed me to find the required papers I need for my work much easier.
The result is that
Why is Nature only digitally available for Windows (Score:3, Informative)
British Medical Journal discussed this 10 year ago (Score:3, Interesting)
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm
I love the opening:
Another proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another proposal (Score:3, Informative)
Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis [jasnh.com]
Misconceptions about "Author Pays" Model (Score:4, Insightful)
It's clear from comments in multiple threads that misconceptions abound about open access and the "author pays" model for funding scientific publication. As a founder of Public Library of Science [plos.org], a SF-based non-profit open access publisher, I would like to respond to these collective comments.
The biggest misconception is that the shift to open access is about a shift from "reader pays" to "author pays". While it may be easy to explain the difference between the two systems that way, the reality is that in either system, the money comes from the same place - the funding agenencies, universities and other research institutions that sponsor scientific research. In the current system they pay indirectly by providing acquisition funds to libraries, covering personal subscriptions in grants, and paying page charges for many journals. Under open access they would pay directly.
So the real question is not WHO pays, but rather how should these organizations pay publishers for the valuable services they provide? Should they use an outdated system in which an invaluable public resource - the published scientific and medical literature - becomes the exclusive private property of publishers and in which huge numbers of people are needlessly denied access to the latest scientific and medical knowledge? Or should they use a system that pays publishers a fair price for the services they provide, but where the finished product is freely available to all?
Evoking images of starving graduate students reaching into their own wallets to pay a greedy publisher for the right to publish the results of their many years labors misses the point completely, because these students will benefit tremendously from open access - not only because they will have something very few of them have today - comprehensive access to the literature that impinges upon their work - but also because the information will be far more useful once it is freed from the artificial barriers that make it difficult to search (very little of this literature is currently indexed in google) or use in other ways.
We obviously have to make sure that authors who do not have access to funds to cover publication costs are still able to publish their work. But this is not that difficult. Consider a scientist at a poor university in a developing country for whom a $1,500 publication charge would be a true hardship. If they publish their work in a fee-for-access journal - e.g. Nature - the global scientific community subsidizes this publication through their subscriptions to Nature. They do this willingly, because they want to read what this scientist has to say. This desire and willingness to subsidize their publication costs won't go away with a switch to open access. Open access journals like PLoS Biology already waive publication costs for authors who can not afford them, and we fully expect to be able to do this in perpetuity.
What's more, most of the scientists who can not afford to pay the costs of publishing in open access journals work at institutions that can not afford subscriptions to very many journals. Today, such authors end up in the absurd position of publishing in journals that they can not read! Those concerned about the lack of egalitarianism in publishing should be far more concerned about the tremendous and worsening imbalance in access to the published literature. Open access fixes this immediately!
Finally, some have expressed the concern that open access will degrade the quality of scientific journals by providing publishers with an economic incentive to lower their standards and publish papers simply to collect a publication fee. While there may indeed be journals that adopt such a strategy, potential authors will quickly realize this, and will be reluctant to publish their work in a journal with such a reputation. Any journal with an interest in attracting the best papers has to maintain an appropriately high standard no matter what their econonmic model.
Michael Eisen [lbl.gov], Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
University of California Berkeley
Co-Founder, Public Library of Science [plos.org]
To clear up some misconceptions in the posts... (Score:4, Informative)
I work for the Public Library of Science [plos.org], an organization dedicated to Open Access publishing, and just wanted to clarify a few issues.
I've only briefly scanned the posts, but wanted to clear up a few things, at least about how we go about open access publishing:
1) ALL of our papers are peer-reviewed to very stringent standards. In fact, many of our editorial board members have worked with high profile for-profit journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.). This is not simply a 'pay to publish' system.
2) Our publication costs are not necessarily prohibitive. We grant waivers to those unable to afford these costs. Incidentally, our publication charge does not currently cover even our own costs.
Currently, for-profit journals are taking advantage of a free labor pool (scientists who donate their time to perform peer review), and turning around and profiting from it. As several readers have mentioned, much of the research published in these journals is funded by taxpayers; the fact that these taxpayers, and even the scientists themselves, have to pay for access to this research is something which needs to be remedied.
Please refer to our website [plos.org] for more information.