Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 16 2018, @06:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the editor-lives-matter dept.

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)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 16 2018, @12:50PM (2 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday March 16 2018, @12:50PM (#653547) Journal

    They provide an established name and branding. This may seem like marketing BS, but there is a big difference between, say, Journal of the American Medical Association or New England Journal of Medicine and Lawn's Huuuge Open Journal of Medical Stuffz!. (Yes, I have ones I can pick on. No, I won't.) Generally anything that makes it through peer review at JAMA or NEJM is something that is reliable. Are there exceptions? Yes - they can get snookered too. (That isn't an argument for Open Access - it is the opposite, in fact). But JAMA and NEJM have names to protect - and if they want the prestige they still have to protect it. I hate to say it, but their profit motives do ensure that they take care with their content and process.

    What protects Open Access from False Academy [nih.gov]? That article hints at the broader truth - the issue isn't the profit motive. It is one of trust and reporting accurately. Charging for a journal doesn't eliminate that problem, true. Neither does making it free - in fact, it could worsen the reliability issue as the "publish or perish" motivation is strong and be an unethical motivator. Science can suffer either way.

    And yes, there is a big difference on a resume of, "I published an article in NEJM," and, "I published an article to Lawn!" There should be - there is a hierarchy of importance of information and discovery. I would love to see an open journal take that first place. But this will occur organically, when an open journal gains more credibility and quality than them.

    Last thing.... if the publishers didn't exist, would there be preprints to give open access to? (Not talking OA journals - talking preprints of pay journals - pay journals disappear then do the same amount of articles occur? That's an open question that AFAIK can't be answered.)

    If the old world journals survive, there are reasons that they do. And, in my opinion, they should. If the system eventually eliminates the need for them, they will disappear. But not this year.

    --
    This sig for rent.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @01:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @01:25PM (#653579)

    Open Access does not mean the journal doesn't have a reputation to lose. If a journal accepts just anything, then publishing there will be no better than self-publishing. Therefore people will not be willing to pay for it (and author payment is how OA journals make their money).

    Indeed, OA journals have even more to lose, as unlike traditional journals, they cannot hope to make money from continue to sell (access to) earlier issues. They can only thrive as long as people publish there, and people will only publish there as long as they see an advantage to do so, especially given that it costs them money.

    Moreover, the higher the reputation of an OA journal, the more money they can ask from authors, as the authors will be more eager to publish there.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @04:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @04:31PM (#653659)

    American Medical Association is getting a lot of money for doing almost nothing, just sends papers for review (for free) to some of the same people that will read it latter. Why couldn't peers that review papers join in a association and do what they do for American Medical Association with much less money?