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The Wellcome Trust has recommended that scientists publish their research in free, open access journals, rather than "hybrid" publications it operates:
Expensive research journal subscriptions could be on the way out, if the Wellcome Trust has its way. The moneybags UK research foundation has published a report favoring free, so-called open access, journals over those that charge a fee for access. The report reviewed the activities of research institutions that received funding from the trust. It found that it is cheaper, and thus a better use of grants, to place papers in freely available journals.
Meanwhile, the trust feels it's not getting enough bang for its bucks from hybrid publications. These hybrids charge scientists a decent wedge of cash to publish their work, charge people for journal subscriptions, and offer access to individual articles for free. In other words, the foundation would rather scientists submit their work to open-access journals, which are cheaper than hybrids in terms of publication and subscription costs. "We find that hybrid open access continues to be significantly more expensive than fully open access journals, and that as a whole, the level of service provided by hybrid publishers is poor and is not delivering what we are paying for," the trust said.
Related: Wellcome Trust and COAF Open Access Spend, 2014-15
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 26 2016, @10:36PM
Will probably come when a lot of top shelf universities band together and throw their weight behind some new journals that aren't part of the Nature/Springer/Elsevier/etc oligopoly. Scientists and researchers have enough to worry about that most of them won't risk submitting what they consider groundbreaking work to an unproven online journal.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27 2016, @02:21AM
risk submitting what they consider groundbreaking work to an unproven online journal.
What the fuck is this bullshit?
What risk? Just publish the shit everywhere. It's fucking information, not a stock investment. The journal(s) who pick up the breakthroughs become more popular. Make the publisher fuckers do some work. That's the real revolution: Stop doing all the work for the publishers and make them your bitches -- they need researchers, not the other way around.
Stop giving grants based on shit that's published and rather by shit that actually leads to successful reproduction and deployment in the field.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pherenikos on Sunday March 27 2016, @02:50AM
Everyone in academia is evaluated by their publications, and often it takes between a year and five years before the community as a whole can really judge if the work is actually groundbreaking. Therefore, people have moved to using the "impact factor" of the journals you publish in as a stand in for the quality of the work. This will impact your tenure review, your grant applications, or even your ability to move from grad school to post-doc or from post-doc to faculty. The only people that can afford to disregard impact factor then are the fully tenured senior faculty, and even for them they will only do it for their single author work so as to not injure their students possibilities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27 2016, @03:05AM
I've noticed that some people publish essentially the same work over and over again, with a differently worded summary and with a rather modest extension with additional results. I think it's because a published paper is a meal ticket for the annual conference in their field, which are often held in a nice resort like Provence. In that case, the researcher would want to aim for the most prestigious journal for the original work, but then could afford to spread out the follow-on work in other journals, even considering some that have just launched and might not last.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Sunday March 27 2016, @04:56AM
Impact factor is complete bullshit. Sorry to be negative.
The sheer volume of publications and the scarcity of competent reviewers, and the fact there is MARKETING involved, makes my scientific spidey sense suspicious of much I read.
Is it irretrievable? Maybe not, because truly brilliant work will get noticed...though maybe later than society might need.
The problem is that really complicated subjects require a great deal of time in education and research to have a good sense of the boundaries of what is reasonable.
So I have a choice when I review - do I tear it to shreds? Then journals may not ask me to review. But then weak publications might get through. And I'm not getting paid...even though the journals are!!!!
Peer review only works well in one instance - when someone publishes something that can be independently tested. If something is published that cannot be challenged (no equipment, expensive materials, impossible to replicate, dogmatic theory), it increase the inertia of poor science. Especially when money is involved...
And then we get to the murky business of "science by press release" so institutions can give the impression they are doing something, which is cheaper than *actually* doing something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27 2016, @06:06AM
yeah. the problem is when you're sitting on the hiring committee for a tenured track position and you have to go through a hundred applications in a couple of hours because you also have to teach and you also have to do your own research and you have a life and stuff. it's at that point that you need just one number per person, and reading one hundred sets of 10-20 papers is not an option. The only things you can read are recommendation letters, and you can also look at the h-index, and you can also check to see if the applicant's peers thought they were worth publishing in a widely read journal (i.e. high impact factor).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27 2016, @02:51PM
From 2001: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 26 2016, @11:05PM
...the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recommending free software?