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In the ongoing open access debate, which oldmedia publishers have been able to drag out for decades, oldmedia publishers have repeatedly made the assertion that articles in their very expensive journals are greatly improved during the publication process. Glyn Moody, writing at Techdirt, discusses the lack of value added by expensive, subscription-only journals over the original, freely-available pre-prints of the very same papers, thus negating the claims from the oldmedia publishers.
Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts.
Scientific method requires that hypotheses be testable, and that means publishing anything necessary for a third party to reproduce an experiment. So some might even say that if your research ends up behind a paywall, then what you are doing is not even science in the formal sense of the concept.
Previously on SN :
New York Times Opinion Piece on Open Access Publishing (2016)
India's Ministry of Science & Technology Join Open-Access Push
(2015)
Open Access Papers Read and Cited More (2014)
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday March 16 2018, @10:12AM (2 children)
Quality is usually (but not always) helped by peer review.
Whiłe there are plentyof journals that are open and peer-reviewed (yes, some have membership requirements), the problem is that *most* universities have "deals" with the profit-making journals, so the researchers don't really notice the cost. When all the universities say "no", things might change - but not in my life time.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=open+peer+reviewed+journals [google.com.au]
https://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/04/reference/plan-b-life-after-the-big-deal/ [libraryjournal.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday March 16 2018, @10:24AM
Whiłe there are plentyof journals that are open and peer-reviewed (yes, some have membership requirements), the problem is that *most* universities have "deals" with the profit-making journals, so the researchers don't really notice the cost. When all the universities say "no", things might change - but not in my life time.
It may happen sooner than you think. Germany has given up on Elsevier [the-scientist.com] as have a few other countries. Developing countries can't afford even one basic bundle. (Bundling a la cable tv, with the good journals spread over several different subscription packages.) It won't take much in some fields to break their hold, but the hold is based more on lobbying than inertia, though inertia is also a big reason. And it will go field by field and not all fields at once. Researchers in each field publish in certain journals because of the Impact Factor [omicsonline.org] which is weighed in their tenure assessments and other career-essential evaluations.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Wootery on Friday March 16 2018, @10:43AM
I'm more optimistic. Hopefully we'll see a continuing rise of the open-access mandate. [wikipedia.org] Things are going in the right direction.