Bernard Rentier on Open Access: From Where? How? For What? And Where To? | Eurodoc

peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-10-23

Summary:

"The major drawback of the development of OA is that, anticipating a reduction in profits if it prevails, the major publishers are now reversing the system and require a payment for publishing rather than for reading, through ‘article processing charges’ (APCs). Building on their prestige, they persuade researchers to publish in their journals, thus ensuring a monopoly on high-end scientific publishing. Worse still, publishers offer so-called ‘hybrid’ formulas, which allows them to keep selling their journals to readers while at the same time asking researchers to pay APCs for immediate free access to their articles, hence winning on both fronts. The cost of APCs has increased just as it has done for journal subscriptions over the past decades. In some cases, it has even increased by 30% yearly! Today, the struggle is less to provide free immediate access to knowledge in the least favoured countries but to prevent a situation where only wealthy researchers can afford to publish. This would be a highly discriminatory development which, after sight has been restored to a majority of the scientific community, deprives it of its voice. In addition, APC-OA stimulates predatory publishing.

The only way to counter this shift is to create publicly-run and free-access online publishing platforms, thus going back to the original ‘golden path'. Neither complicated nor new. Alongside ArXiv, other new publication platforms have also emerged in a variety of fields.

It remains for the scientific community worldwide to adhere to the new progressive principles of Open Science. In particular, the criteria for research assessment and the evaluation of researchers should no longer be based on an anti-scientific proxy: the publishers’ prestige...."

Link:

http://eurodoc.net/news/2018/bernard-rentier-on-open-access-from-where-how-for-what-and-where-to

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.strategies oa.oa_week oa.intro oa.history_of oa.obstacles oa.metrics oa.incentives oa.recommendations oa.fees oa.prestige

Date tagged:

10/23/2018, 16:11

Date published:

10/23/2018, 12:11