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from the paywall-or-not-paywall-that-is-the-question dept.
A new global study from AIP Publishing, the American Physical Society (APS),IOP Publishing (IOPP) and Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA)indicates that the majority of early career researchers (ECRs) [Researchers with 1–5 years of experience] want to publish open access (OA) but they need grants from funding agencies to do so.
[...] 67% of ECRs say that making their work openly available is important to them. Yet, 70% have been prevented from publishing OA because they have not been able to access the necessary monies from funding agencies to cover the cost. When asked why ECRs favour OA publishing, agreeing with its principles and benefitting from a wider readership were cited as the top two reasons.
Daniel Keirs, head of journal strategy at IOP Publishing said: "The OA views of the next generation of physicists are important as they are the harbingers of change when it comes to scholarly communications. What we see from this study is that ECRs believe that OA is the future, and they want to be able to reap the benefits of unrestricted access to research. Good progress has been made, but the transition to full OA must neither put researchers at a disadvantage nor disregard the costs necessary to produce, protect and preserve the quality and integrity of scholarly articles and the scientific record."
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday July 29 2022, @08:35AM (3 children)
So, early career people, they have no citations. So they want to get cited and of course want to get published in some high quality journals. But then maybe they are doing just boring things that only 3 others care about and have grant access through their supervisors, mostly. The supervisors don't care about Open Access for everything because they (the community of researchers) already have access to the other journals anyway (just go to university library and you have access). And it's more important to get published in the niche journal for the field than some larger open access one.
Long story short, OA readership is not going to make some ECR a notable person but like everyone early in their career, sometimes we think we are cowboys on the frontier and want to make a name for ourselves. The reality, like science, is more methodological and pragmatic.
As for physicists, well, for every one place available for a postdoc, there are 5 candidates. This means that 80+% don't end up working in the field anyway. But that's not necessarily a bad thing - physicists tend to be good problem solvers and are useful everywhere you need a brain ;)
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday July 29 2022, @08:43AM
On the other hand, the added value of *journal* is minimal. It's just some stupid gatekeeper arrangement that most academic recruiters use to cut down the number of applications. Might as well just push to arxiv and count citations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @12:53PM
Don't downplay the philosophical angle. As you say, if you are an ECR in an academic setting, you unfortunately need to pay attention to what journals you send your stuff to and play the Q score or whatever metric they're using these days. However, if your career doesn't depend upon publication and you aren't as worried about impact factors and whatnot, the desire to publish OA can have more relative importance. You can do both with some journals, but now we're back to what the article is about, where the journal will list it as OA if you pay an extra thousand bucks or so. My career hasn't depended upon publications, but I certainly would get gold stars for doing it and better chances for quicker career advancement, but definitely nothing like "publish or perish." I certainly strongly feel that I would like my next journal paper to be published OA because I have derived so much value over my career having access to free and open source information. (The rub here is that I probably won't write another journal article before I retire, but I probably will write more conference papers, where thus far I have not seen an OA option offered)
I would love to see the academic institutions take a principled stance and cover the extra OA fees out of overhead. You can argue whether they should have to, or whose responsibility it should be, but in the meantime they should just do it. The amount of money it would be would be tiny compared to the institution overhead they bring in.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @03:47PM
> As for physicists, well, for every one place available for a postdoc, there are 5 candidates.
You are talking about PhD oversupply. And that is a fact - but having been in unis for 20+ years actual physicists are still about the same number as always: not many. Most of the PhD oversupply seems to be for foreign kids to get visas and go onto more training(!) or good paying jobs... that should be going to Americans (or native country).
In other words, a grad degree is a path out of shitholery and into the West, and physics can fuck itself for all they care. Squeeze out 5 turds in low quality journals and get a piece of paper proving you play nice with corporate clowns. They do it worse, they do it cheaper, so what's not to like?