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Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.
The reason it is so lucrative is because most of the costs of its content is picked up by taxpayers. Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers. To rub salt into the wound they then sell it via exorbitant subscriptions and paywalls, often paid for by taxpayers too.
[...] The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available (see "An audacious new plan will make all science free. Can it work?"). When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 26 2018, @04:19AM (4 children)
I'm very much in favor of moving toward open access for all scholarly publications, but there are very good reasons why a lot of people seem to be signing onto that open letter mentioned at the end, as well as finding other ways to question Plan S. (I'd suggest following the link and reading the concerns before dismissing them.)
All the info I can find on Plan S is relatively vague. Yes, it has very laudable goals, but there are a lot of practical details that could end up creating a lot of disruption. Just a few to ponder:
-- Open-access publication isn't free. There are still costs associated with organizing a journal, copyediting, the "grunt work" of sending articles out for review, coordinating all of that, etc. In small journals, much of this may be done by a part-time administrative assistant (and a third-party for copyediting, etc.) but larger journals can have quite a few staff members. Even if it's an electronic-only journal, someone has to maintain the infrastructure of the hosting, etc. For open-access journals, these must all be paid through up-front publication fees, rather than through subscription revenue.
-- Anyhow, who pays for these costs (i.e., publication fees)? Plan S says universities and funding agencies should pay them, not authors. Setting aside the fact that this effectively eliminates even the possibility of independent scholars who operate outside standard academia, how exactly does Plan S guarantee universities will pay as needed? The claim is that universities will save so much money on journal subscriptions, etc. that they can divert it into paying for publication costs -- but who is going to be enforcing this on budgets within each university? What's to say the saved money won'y simply be diverted away from libraries and used for something else?
-- Similarly, Plan S simply states that authors at poorer universities shouldn't be put at a disadvantage. Huh? How exactly can it guarantee that? And let's forget about the university level for the moment and just consider disciplines. The whole of Plan S is very STEM-centric, assuming that researchers will have funding grants to pay for their research. The idea also seems to be that Plan S will ask grant-providers to roll in the costs for publication in their grants (which is already done by some organizations that encourage open-access publication). But what about researchers who don't operate with such grants? Most of the humanities and many other related disciplines often don't have large grant agencies providing budgets for their research. Rather, most such scholars simply receive salaries for combined teaching and research (and occasionally just for research in Europe) -- which in many cases still would be considered "public funded" according to the Plan S model, since their salaries may be partly or wholly coming from public funding. Such scholars don't have grants and large research budgets that they can siphon off money to for publication fees. Again, Plan S assumes universities will magically move money to fund these fees, but will they? How will that be enforced?
-- Roughly 80-90% of journals in most fields will be made off-limits for publication under Plan S. That often includes most of the major journals in many fields. Many scholars are under pressure to publish to receive promotions. In some fields, there are basically no open-access journals with a high reputation. Eventually, these issues will be sorted out if Plan S comes into being, as journals realign with open-access models, but that will take time. In the meantime, what about the researchers whose careers depend on publishing now? Where are they supposed to publish? Plan S again simply states that funding sources should encourage the creation of open-access journals -- seriously?? How is all that going to happen? What's the timeline? It takes time to create a journal from scratch. What are researchers supposed to do in the meantime? What will happen as they all scramble to publish in a much smaller group of acceptable journals for the near future?
-- On a related note, most closed-access journals aren't going to change their policies overnight. Many of them are top journals in their field. So how is all this magical revenue from saved subscription costs going to materialize to fund new publication when libraries will have to continue paying tor subscriptions to top journals at most universities anyway... unless (until?) this becomes a truly global phenomenon.
-- What about collaboration outside the region with these policies? An American academic who has different expectations for promotion and still can publish in high-reputation closed-access journals is not going to want to collaborate with a European if that will force publication in a substandard journal. Are we going to end up with a (hopefully temporary) barrier against collaboration inside and outside Europe?
-- Paradoxically, this will likely result in further consolidation of the publication industry among large corporations. Why? Because Elsevier et all. aren't just going to stand blindly by and die if this really becomes the trend. They will adapt, even if it means grossly reduced profits. They will become open-access publishers. Meanwhile, though, you have a lot of small-scale publishers that are often affiliated with academic institutions and are frequently non-profit or set up as charities. (Well-known examples include things like Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.) These publishers often fight to keep their costs reasonable, but they often have very little revenue. Oxford and Cambridge could likely make a transition, but many small-scale and non-profit publishers may have difficulty weathering a sudden storm like this. Open-access seems a higher-priority to me than a diverse market, but I'm not sure a sudden shift like this with a lot of questions unanswered will result in a market less entrenched in large corporate entities still in charge of setting publication fees to make profits.
-- Plan S mentions "sanctions" to those researchers who don't conform, but it doesn't explain what those might be. Seems an important detail.
Perhaps such a heavy-handed and fast transition is the shock needed to finally move significantly toward open-access. But let's be prepared that without working out the details, we could easily see the careers of an entire generation of researchers put in jeopardy, entire fields of research drying up temporarily or permanently (because of lack of funding for publication and/or lack of extant open-access journals to publish in), the segregation of scientific publishing worlds into regions (and potential reduction of collaboration across them), and a very chaotic transition for small-scale and non-profit publishers who have already tried to keep costs down but may not be able to compete or transition quickly enough.
Ultimately, I assume much of these problems would work themselves out over several years, but it could be quite chaotic in the meantime. Even many entities who support the idea of Plan S seem to be questioning the details and how it will be implemented.
At the moment it seems more like a "blow everything up and worry about how to rebuild later" than an actual "plan" forward. I just hope it doesn't disrupt science in a major way in the process. Or, worse, I hope it doesn't fail due to poor implementation, leading to a repeal in a few years that will likely only make the big corporations stronger while laying waste to their small (and often more reasonable) competitors.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @04:31AM (1 child)
Another side effect of OA publishing and "pay to publish" models: your journal brings in more revenue if you publish more.
Which means there's an incentive for OA publishers to put out more mediocre or low-quality research. Either that or charge exorbitant fees that only rich universities and well-funded researchers can afford.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday November 26 2018, @12:56PM
as a panel reviewer - *this*.
If only a single publication/year was allowed, there would be academics that published useful stuff every leap year.
The best example of a good publication (my bias - I was impressed) was the GFP(Green Fluorescent Protein) one that led to the Nobel .
The paper had pretty much everything need to get going with flurorescent probes.
If any other soylentils would like to propose other "good papers" that would be nice ;-)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @04:44AM
Yet another unintended side effect: many academic societies publish journals, which are often top journals in a field. The subscription costs and membership fees for such journals often provide a lot of other services for members of those societies, like funding grants of various kinds to support scholars (grants for travel, publication expenses, awards for top publications, etc.).
This policy could potentially disrupt those dynamics too or force major reorganization. Maybe that's needed, but such societies may have contracts with the big publishers that may not be so easily dispensed with quickly. Or they might need significant changes to covert to an OA model, even if their goal hasn't been profiteering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @01:34PM
As a researcher, two more things:
1. Price of publishing in OA journals is usually high enough to eat funds dedicated to e.g. conference. This is quite large problem in some universities, if they have to choose between visibility in conferences and in journals.
2. Title piracy. Seriously, I have no idea about other name for this kind of actions. Generally, every few months there are some "lists of bad journals" going around universities, some of them are sponsored by one publisher, some by another, some seem to be more or less neutral. Generally, authors of such lists don't want to be detected here and lists are mostly published on free hostings, without any information about who did these lists, and if there is a short bio of some professor, it's impossible to find/contact the author of the list. My crappy hobby website is on the hosting paid around 25USD per year with domain and I can put hundreds of such lists there, as well as most universities have free hosting platforms for such kind of stuff for employees... and the author chooses free hosting? Young researchers usually don't get manipulated, but old ones do it permanently.