Why would a researcher who has access to most journals himself be bothered to submit a paper to an open access journal and pay the publication costs when there are similarly ranked “closed” journals that are supported by subscriptions and cheaper to submit to?
I can see the appeal of OA journals, and I can see the merit of having work in there, but I am not a tight-budgeted, heavily publishing, uninterested-in-open-access PI. And yet there are many of them, and they produce a huge chunk of the scientific literature. What’s the incentive for those people to choose Open Access over subscription journals? If they’re at an institution with a good library, they don’t need it themselves.
Hi Eva – the answer in the UK is that the funding agencies (at least those operating in the life/medical sciences) require the work that they pay for to be “open access”. If you don’t play ball, you may find yourself high and dry after a couple of years…
Ooh, that’s good! I didn’t know that. But then what if the work is hard to publish/review and ends up in a “closed” journal if that’s the only outlet that will publish it (eg. it’s very specific to a certain sub-field)? Is there a certain % of publications that need to be open/closed?
As I understand it, the onus is on the authors of the paper to make sure they submit to a journal that permits open access. This can be done in 2 ways: either the author pays a fee so that the journal allows free access from its web-site or the journal permits the author to deposit the final version of the manuscript in a public depository (e.g. Pubmed Central). In the latter case, it is the author’s version that is deposited, I believe, not the version that has been type-set by the journal; it won’t look as nice but should have exactly the same information content.
Co-incidentally we’ve just had a paper accepted by J. Mol. Biol. which is run by Elsevier. They charge a fee of $5000 (!) for open access but happily the Wellcome Trust, who funded the research, will cough up the readies!
Charity Starts at Home was what I was always told. I stand by that.
Some myths about Open Access
In more recent times (16th April 2008), the most simplest layout of the largest hillock on the global landscape ($28B @ year) can be found here.
And most significantly, MOST OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS DO NOT CHARGE ANY PUBLICATION FEE.
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I quote in part (this came in earlier today before I spotted this thread BTW) another frustrated UK Academic who’s labs latest important work (affects shed-loads of people) got limited but warranted media attention – but that was it…. The science comes to an abrupt halt c/o Traditional Copyright/Closed Journal.
I’ve now digested this great research and another bad day for the population when as usual, we can’t broadly access (in this case, Charity funded) research.
The person said:-
…I also applaud and support your efforts on Open Access to scientific literature. Our recent work cost almost £1000 to publish, and as it was completely supported by charitable donations I had to use alternative funding to cover this cost, and was not able to meet the demand for a further £1000 odd to permit immediate open access. If you consider my institute pays several thousand pounds a year to provide us access to this same publication and I spend several hours a year of my free time peer reviewing for that same publication (with no financial reward), you may understand my frustration at the current system. However, it is also vital for scientists to publish in these high profile journals in order to convince employers and funding agencies to allow them to work, quite a dilemma.
I have attached a recent review which may be of interest to you, and if there are specific papers that you would like to have copies of I’d be happy to send you them (for your own reading of course!).
You can find a complete list of our publications on the internet.
But how many of the free ones are in Bio? And what are their impact factors, because I’m pretty sure people care about that, too =)
That last story is ridiculous: they would have had to pay 2000 pounds for OA publication in a journal that also gets money from subscribers? That is exactly the opposite business model of the (stdent-run) journal I’m an editor with: we don’t charge anyone anything and get funding from UofT. Sadly we get a lot of very crappy submissions and have had to reject almost everything we received the past year, so that we had to skip one issue altogether (too empty, not worth the printing costs). Working on that problem, though.
There was a stupid typo in this post that nobody noticed! Where’s rpg when you need him?
I had to find it all by myself now!
This time zone lark is a pain, innit?
Stephen writes: the funding agencies (at least those operating in the life/medical sciences) require the work that they pay for to be “open access”.
Same holds for the US.
This is a slight red-herring as far as Eva’s question goes, because most publishers who do not use the open-access business model , eg publishers who use the subscription business model, operate well within the policies of these funders. NPG for example, permits and encourages researchers to post their articles into a repository such as pub med central six months after publication, long before any of these funders made it a requirement. (The funders require 12 months). Elsevier and other large publishers have similar policies.
Author behaviour in general “across the board” is that most of them don’t seem to feel strongly about whether the journal is open access business model or not when they are wearing their author hat, although obviously there is a strong vocal group that are very keen on the open access business model for reasons of personal conviction, etc.
Most authors would rather go for a high-impact journal than an open-access one, if they had to prioritise their choice (as demonstrated by various surveys, where people choose to submit, etc).
Most authors would rather go for a high-impact journal than an open-access one, if they had to prioritise their choice (as demonstrated by various surveys, where people choose to submit, etc).
Let’s look at the evidence
Well, a year ago, I did a small random survey of about a dozen of my many academic contacts. I’ve just posted the results online.
UK based Key Perspectives (KP) on the other
flipperhand have been navigating such waters for much longer and in a much bigger vessel than my small dinghy. So, what did they catch in their net?This, our second author study on open access, was carried out to determine the current state of play with respect to author self-archiving behaviour.
The survey was carried out during the last quarter of 2004. There were 1296 respondents.
Open access self-archiving: An author study
Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. [Departmental Technical Report]
From page 12 for example:-
….Once again, the rank order and level of response for the options match those found in the previous study. The main reasons why authors have not published in an open access journal are that:
• they are not familiar with the concept or with OA journals in their field
• they could not identify a suitable one to publish in.
Interestingly, just as they did in the previous survey, authors who have not published in OA journals also say that they perceive them to have low prestige and impact, directly contradicting the perceptions of the authors who have published in an OA journal.
Forty nine percent of respondents say they are likely to publish at least one article in an open access journal in the next 3 years. 27% say this is very likely and 22% that it is likely. 15% are ambivalent (neither likely nor unlikely), 12% think it somewhat unlikely, 3% will not do so and 18% don’t know.
My own “Key Perspective” remains that regardless as to where you choose to publish, ARCHIVE YOUR WORK in an Institutional Repository so that people/robots can freely read it !!
Just to note, I’m aware of that study, which shows a range of awareness and attitudes to this publishing model as well as the ones Graham identifies, but there are plenty of other studies, some of which start from a neutral standpoint rather than from the standpoint of a particular business model. I’m sorry but I don’t have time to look them all up individually, but please check out our “authorship” bookmark in Connotea via Nautilus if you are interested in following up.
Apart from surveys of past experience and future intentions, there is also actual practice, which is perhaps more relevant to your original question, directed at PIs (not sure what proportion of them are in the groups Graham identifies, ie are these proportions filtered for PIs are are they all scientists?) and so they would need to answer you themeselves for you to know for sure. However, my experience as a journal editor and reader of journals is that most PIs, when authors, want to publish in what they perceive as the “best” journal in terms of its content, prestige, influence and readership, rather than according to the publishing business model of that journal. There are some exceptions of course, but that’s what the majority seem to do as things stand.