Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: Open or not?

Bart Janssen

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:58:02 +1200

And a couple more thoughts.

There are real costs to the peer review system. It takes time to organise editors and reviewers and hence money. It takes time to copy edit really well and hence money. Those are real costs. We need to figure out methods to pay such costs,…

Bart Janssen

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:47:59 +1200

no idea how to evolve to cope with the needs of todays academics

This has been the topic of many a tea time discussion. The key word above is evolve.

Quite simply the current publishing system evolved over centuries. It's purpose was to disseminate scientific findings, observations, theories and discoveries…

Bart Janssen

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:21:30 +1200

increasing analysis of impact factors

For those who don't know, impact factors are a way of comparing journals. Theoretically a higher impact factor journal will be read by more scientists and papers within that journal will be cited by more scientists.

Hence administrators like to see staff publish in high…

Kyle Matthews

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 13:13:06 +1200

I do wonder if google or some other institution is going to try and break this open. Currently the barrier to greater web only publishing having an impact is the publishing component – the content, editing, peer reviewing is typically done by academics for free.

A significant move by a…

Geoff Lealand

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 21:59:53 +1200

Much of the problem is to do with the damn PBRF, which persists in placing the laboured book or highly specialised, peer-reviewed article at the top of the heap. I have had book chapters in overseas collections arrive 4 or 5 years after I wrote the thing and it is…

Hilary Stace

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 21:34:09 +1200

The shareholders are doing nicely. I think we are in the wrong part of the enterprise.

HORansome

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 14:58:37 +1200

Well, there's no money for us academics in being an editor or peer reviewer. The journal publishers, though, seem to make quite a bit of money from the enterprise.

Hilary Stace

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:02:12 +1200

From my perspective – as a occasional writer, and peer reviewer for academic journals – there is no money at all in academic publishing, in fact it costs as it takes away from time that could be spent on money making activities. Brave souls sometimes take on roles as guest…

David Hood

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:06:12 +1200

A Times Higher Ed. article also does not like the Gold model.

Richard Dearden

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:05:08 +1200

This would mean having to know a name, and to search across multiple names to find appropriate articles/research.

Presumably you used the Journal's search engine on keywords. I find that Google does just as well, and isn't limited to a single journal.

The irritating thing in my field is that…

Christopher Dempsey

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:20:10 +1200

I don't pretend to understand how publishing journal articles work. All I know is my experience as a finishing PhD student, sometime lecturer at University of Auckland, and sometime reviewer of academic books.

From my perspective, good quality journals are great (but few and far between). They aggregate research (within…

Rich of Observationz

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:12:34 +1200

ukgovt.com

I think you mean Her Brittanic Majesties Most Exalted and Imperial Government, don't you. It isn't 2012 or something.

81stcolumn

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:27:02 +1200

So why don't either the UK government or a consortium of governments set up a peer review co-ordination body (in the UK, maybe around the research councils which do most of the funding)?

After many years spent undermining collegiality (and believing they had benefitted from it) this would require a…

Rich of Observationz

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:19:00 +1200

peer reviewing is still mostly free labour provided by the institutions and their academics

So why don't either the UK government or a consortium of governments set up a peer review co-ordination body (in the UK, maybe around the research councils which do most of the funding)? With suitable process…

Euan Mason

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:53:03 +1200

This shifts publication costs from research users to research providers, and it changes some incentives. At present journal editors have a financial interest in quality research because quality attracts subscribers. If journals only require volume to make a profit then we should see a gradual relaxation in publication standards. In…

Grant Taylor

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:11:00 +1200

My perspective as an 'end-user' of published research who works outside of academic settings is that the costs of access are prohibitive, even for many commercial organisations. Perhaps there was a time, long, long ago, when the bulk of knowledge worth knowing within a field of endeavour was published in…

HORansome

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:03:04 +1200

The problem, as you say, is very much the model. As best as I can tell, the Gold model essentially props up a moribund industry that has no idea how to evolve to cope with the needs of todays academics. The Green model, would keep that industry alive for a…

Ben Curran

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:55:49 +1200

where the cost of paying for open access publishing is close to the cost of journal subscriptions. Add to this the problem that, at the moment, the money spent on publishing (which, as Luke pointed out, doesn't necessarily go to the editors or reviewers) mostly still goes to the same…

HORansome

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:03:47 +1200

The first problem you outline is an accounting problem. The university has to stump up with the money either through a journal description or a paying for papers to be published. If chunks of the subscription charges were funnelled through departments, this wouldn't be a problem. They're currently not, this…

Tim Darlington

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:03:21 +1200

There are two problems standing in the way of expansion of Green OA:

1. The current model is largely based on authors signing copyright on their work over to the journal publisher, who has a direct financial interest in NOT undercutting the current model through allowing authors to publish their…

Shaun Lott

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:43:18 +1200

Some of the problem here is indeed, as pointed out by HORansome, that the shift to 'Gold OA' represents a shift in $ from the library's subscriptions budget to the researcher's operating costs. Another key part is the copyright restrictions that have made 'Green OA' hard to achieve.

In some…

Luke Goode

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:28:30 +1200

There's still a strong whiff of 'racket' in the Gold model, e.g. Springer Science currently charging authors EUR2000 (>3k NZD) plus VAT to go OA (as well as appearing in closed journal), while peer reviewing is still mostly free labour provided by the institutions and their academics. But we're inching…

David Hood

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:21:56 +1200

need to publish in big name journals with high impact factors (A and some B grade journals)

As part (I think) of the movement surrounding OA, I have been seeing increasing analysis of impact factors, and criticism of them. So, in much the same time period as the boom in…

Ben Curran

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:20:08 +1200

David Hood

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:09:58 +1200

Also, in at least some version of the "Gold" model I have seen the phrase "access for the people of the United Kingdom" has be a part of the wording, In those models the U.K. was effectively buying subscription access for the country to the journals. I haven't checked if…

HORansome

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:06:35 +1200

Let me add my somewhat considered thoughts here (considered because I'm currently submitting material to academic articles); the "open access" moniker is a bit troubling at the moment precisely because of the cost, for researchers, to make their articles open access.

The "Gold OA" class of journals really do charge…

81stcolumn

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:59:54 +1200

Some issues worth considering:

i) Universities both here and in the UK are reviewed on research outputs by formulas and schemes that variously reward "quality" and "volume". I can foresee a point where cost of publication becomes an issue for those with limited funds.

ii) Whatever changes come about in…

Ben Curran

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:57:09 +1200

There's two problems. The first being that the people who pay don't have access to the work that they fund. The second being that there is an absurd amount of money being wasted on subscriptions.

We can celebrate the fact that the work would now be available to the public…

Public Address

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:57:09 +1200

Discussion from blog post.