Well, after being away from email, internet, and my RSS feeds for the last few weeks fly fishing and backpacking in Northern Michigan, I come to find out that I missed two fairly big web-based flare-ups (side note: nothing like a little nature to renew your interest in doing environmental research). The first, dealing with my former undergrad research advisor Richard Lenski and the creationist response to his recent PNAS paper on experimental evolution, is pretty much over but is worth catching up on if you haven’t read about it yet. The second is the backlash to an editorial written in Nature about the PLoS publishing model (see John Wilbanks’ blog here for his take on the action).

I’m not going to add much insight into the for-profit vs. not-for-profit model of scientific publishing, nor compare the ‘big’ journals like Nature and Science to the other journals. But I will say this: I do like the idea of open access papers, especially for emerging nations with growing interest and activity in science. PLoS seems like the biggest player in the open access movement right now along with BioMed Central, but that’s a problem for people like me; these journals are almost entirely ‘bio’ focused. Even though there is a strong bio component of my research, most of my work (and that of my colleagues) probably belongs in physical science journals. For geochemists specifically, there is one open access journal that I’ve ever read: Geochemical Transactions.

Geochemical Transactions has bounced around a lot from different societies/ownerships in its brief existence (American Institute of Physics and BioMed Central, now operated by the Geochemistry Division of the American Chemical Society but not operated through ACS Publications) and to my knowledge, didn’t start out with open access in mind. Not only is it struggling to find its identity, the journal is publishing a very low number of papers (so far, only eight papers have been published in 2008). The dropping impact factor, although a flawed method, is also worth noting. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, there are 61 journals in environmental science and 57 in geology, but Geochemical Transactions is honestly the only one I’ve ever heard of, let alone read any of its content. In the chemical sciences, there are even less open access options.

So, the problem is what to do if you’re interested in publishing in an open access journal in Earth and environmental science? Why, along with many Web 2.0-based tools, is the focus primarily biology? If you need proof, look no further than the background of most Nature Network users. Is it simply a function of the number or researchers in the field? Nearly every university has geology, environmental science, environmental engineering, chemistry, etc. programs so I doubt the discrepancy stems from that. Seems to me that environmental issues have never been bigger than in society than today, but why is there no equivalent rise in the options for scientific publishing in these fields, not to mention the lack of science funding?

Anyway, that’s where I am on this. Left with a bunch of questions. But honestly, what are we to do? Should we sacrifice publishing in a ‘lower-tier,’ relatively unknown journal and risk no one reading our work just for the open access cause? I know with the powerful search engines of today it’s becoming less of a problem, but what about when I finish my post-doc and my next potential employer looks through my publication list and thinks my work is not important because it was published in journal that she has never heard of? True, that isn’t fair, but I doubt everyone will take the time to consider each publication on a case-by-case basis.

I guess the bottom line is that I’d love to even have the possibility of discussing the merits of open access publishing in our field (a la the recent Nature vs. PLoS feud) but it seems I’ll have to wait for us to catch up.