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The New York Times has an opinion piece about Open Access publishing. It starts with the case of Alexandra Elbakyan a guerilla open access activist who is on the lam from the US government acting on behalf of the copyright cartel. Pricing and other restrictions put many journals out of reach of all but the few researchers at major, well-funded universities in developed nations. The large publishing companies usually have profit margins over 30% and subscription prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care, which itself is priced insanely, over the past two decades, so there appears to be a real scandal there. Several options are available including pre-print repositories and various open access journals. The latter require the author to pay up front for publishing. However, the real onus lies on the communities' leaders, like heads of institutions and presidents of universities, who are in a position to change which journals are perceived as high-impact.
Edit: Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub in 2011.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @03:46AM
> The scientific community collectively decides which journals are the prestigious ones.
Not really. Hiring has been turned on its head in the last 50 or more years. It is now the administrators who hire the faculty members not the other way around. As such they are the ones that decide which journals weigh more in the hiring process.
In day to day use, maybe faculty members have more say in which journals to use, but the reality is that they will publish in the ones that the administrators use when selecting candidates for a position. Given the excessive number of candidates per available tenure-track positions, the administrators have a surprising amount of pull in the area of making a journal important or not. If, for example, the majority of them decided that candidates must have at least one article in a PLoS journal, we'd see a tipping point crossed and open access being established as the norm. It's moving that direction slowly and with a lot of push-back from the big publishers, but if the publishers were removed or made constructive instead of obstructive, we could see the change completed in an academic generation instead of having to wait decades more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:29PM
Postdocs and junior faculty shooting for tenure try to publish in the journals with the highest impact factor, which is a factor that is largely set by the scientific community. Any weight put in by the "bean counters" on impact factors is still the result of what the community decides are the prestigious journals. Admin can't determine what are high impact journals unless they band together and collude.
If you want to change which journals are high-impact, you need to change the attitudes of those publishing, which starts at the top of the scientific community. Get them to publish their works in open-access journals, which will raise their impact ratings, which will draw in the junior members.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:42PM
Admin can't determine what are high impact journals unless they band together and collude.
Which is another way of saying that they could agree on a policy. Some individual universities are moving that direction, Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences [harvard.edu] and UC Berkeley [berkeley.edu], to name two, publish or encourage open access. They have a lot to gain by working together nationally or internationally.
The postdocs and junior faculty are in the middle of the rat race and unable to affect the rules. Only those that have come out the other side and, maybe, those just starting can shift the market. The former have the status, connections and experience to influence progress, especially tenured, university executives, or even retired faculty. An extreme example would be Randy Schekman mentioned below by purpleland [soylentnews.org]. Those just starting, such as graduate students can affect the situation to a lesser extent, but at a higher risk because they are just entering what might be a career.
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