It’s Open Access Week, as Martin Fenner has noted already on the Nature Network.
Last week the head of Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Warwick Anderson, told the Australasian Medical Writers Association conference that the NHMRC was planning to introduce a new requirement in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, regarding publication.
Research funded by the NHMRC will need to be made open access within six months of publication. This doesn’t mean researchers need to publish in open access journals. If they don’t, they can release their research papers through university repositories, Warwick suggested.
Another speaker for that session of the conference was Sally Murray, Deputy Editor of Open Medicine. She talked about open access models of publication, stressing the integrity of the journal she helped launch, including its non-profit emphasis. She talked about how seeking advertising and print sales undermines the independence of traditional journals. She also mentioned how her university job allows her to edit the journal, as there isn’t money to pay the editors (yet).
Warwick mentioned this in his presentation following, to demonstrate that open access publishing isn’t entirely successful yet. He raised concern that Sally’s university was subsidising her work on the journal. Sally was perturbed by this, which is fair enough in my opinion.
In my experience, researchers don’t edit journals or chair committees for money, but for credibility. It’s in a university’s interests to have senior researchers on the pulse of their field internationally, acting as gatekeepers in editorial roles.
Also, as Sally pointed out, universities pay journal publishers massive amounts of money to access them. They’re already paying for the administration of journals, but as consumers rather than contributors. Open access journals just reverse that model.
Am I missing something here?
Am I missing something here?
I don’t think so.
Even more costs could be cut if Universities started to have their own online journals where the work that is done at the university is presented. Peer review could be done by researchers from other universities, a professional editor could be hired by each university, or a senior scientist appointed, the language department could possibly help with fine tuning the manuscripts, etc etc.
All the knowledge you need to publish good quality research is basically present within each major university.
You could even do it on a national level or as a consortium of topical research programs from different universities.
Needless to say you will still need to convince the researchers that they need to sacrifice their careers since it still seems to matter where the research is published and not how important it is, or how well it is executed, or how accessible it is.
/end fantasy
A number of possible resources come to mind. Let’s choose something very recent:-
“As Open Access Week 2009 gets underway, the Wellcome Trust has called for greater transparency among publishers to counter the argument that access fees are being paid twice – once through subscriptions and again through publication fees”.
Source and more under the fold
Mark – don’t give up the fantasy job yet.
If Universities signed up to a national publication protocol, their hiring policies would no longer ‘need to be’ be guided by the journal impact factors, but could more easily be guided by the actual impact of papers published by the scientists. The research, rather than the journals, would indicate the quality of the scientist.
Of course, self citation and nepotism could still be an issue in driving up article impact, but they are already existing problems. The national publication policy would at least be a step in the right direction.
I don’t quite see what Warwick’s problem is. Perhaps he is concerned about sustainability? It is one thing for an academic to run a small journal on an unfunded basis, but if it expands or becomes highly successful then the demands on the time of the editor and the resources needed to host it will both increase.
But, journal editors already often give a great deal of time to journals for free, or for a small remuneration, so I’m not sure that the OA journal example is anything new.
There’s neem an interesting paper on the impact factor/quality issue and how it distorts science in PLos Medicine recently. The authors say:
“The scarcity of available outlets is artificial, based on the costs of printing in an electronic age and a belief that selectivity is equivalent to quality. Science is subject to great uncertainty: we cannot be confident now which efforts will ultimately yield worthwhile achievements. However, the current system abdicates to a small number of intermediates an authoritative prescience to anticipate a highly unpredictable future. In considering society’s expectations and our own goals as scientists, we believe that there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated.”