Making Science Public » The end of journals? Open access, impact and the production of knowledge

pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks 2012-12-07

Summary:

"Under direction from the government, there is a drive to make publicly funded research open access; that is, if you go to the website where the journal article resides, non-subscribers will not be met by a page asking you to part with $30+ for the privilege of reading. Research articles will be free to read….but not free to publish. Instead of the publishing companies being funded by university libraries paying for journal subscriptions, income streams will instead come from authors. There are various models of open access available, but the underlying principle is that authors pay for their article to be published in a journal. The cost will generally be around £900 to £2000, which will theoretically be built into future proposals for research funding. While there is widespread support for tearing down the paywalls around research findings, changing publishing’s funding model raises some significant issues, not least for the social sciences where monographs (books) and other non-journal outputs play a more significant role than in the natural sciences (although this may be on the decline).  If you are new to the debate,  Here, I will concentrate on just one of the most far-reaching potential consequences – the withering away of the journal... Placing the cost of publishing onto the author brings the role of publishing companies in the journal merry-go-round into sharp focus. Despite efforts by the industry to defend their role, it is striking to me that academic publishing’s unique selling point – peer review – is the one which is almost entirely unfunded, relying on the goodwill of academics to act as reviewers or editors. Having acted as a co-editor on the ENQUIRE postgraduate journal over the last 12 months, I have seen first-hand how the entire reviewing, editing and publishing process can be done for practically zero (financial) cost... This is all very well, but the suspicion remains that the impact agenda is being driven by the status of the journals in which papers are published, which acts as a proxy for making a judgement on the quality of an article. While publishing companies maintain a stranglehold on the top journals and impact remains central to the HE agenda, these journals will continue to benefit from a stream of submissions from impact-hungry authors. But what if impact becomes less important in academia? Or perhaps more realistically, what if the interpretation of impact changes? ... This leaves the question: what future for journals? I posed this to a panel at the LSE Future of Impact Conference on Tuesday. Stephen Curry‘s answer was closest to my own thoughts, which I will paraphrase as ‘journals were a good idea in the seventeenth century, but the idea is now coming apart at the seams’. If (and it is an if) we move to a focus on intrinsic quality of content, rather than the perceived quality of the journal itself, in conjunction with a drive towards open access based on a Creative Commons-BY licence allowing free reuse and republication of material (with attribution), what role remains for journals? Organising peer review perhaps, but why not have editorial boards break away from publishing houses and organise themselves more explicitly as subject-specific research networks, or as specifically tied to universities – a new form of university press perhaps? At least that way the ‘value added’ by a journal – chiefly through peer review – can be kept within the HE sector rather than leaching out to multinational publishing houses... The picture I paint here is one of current trends being taken to their logical conclusion, where the scholarly journal becomes decoupled from traditional publishers; moving to leaner models of closed peer review or incorporating more open refereeing and alternative metrics for judging paper quality ... There is a great overview by Harvard’s Peter Suber and a good beginner’s guide to the different open access models by Bill Hubbard and here at Making Science Public we compiled 

Link:

http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2012/12/06/the-end-of-journals-open-access-impact-and-the-production-of-knowledge/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.impact oa.costs oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.copyright oa.cc oa.peer_review oa.quality oa.prestige oa.prices oa.altmetrics oa.fees oa.metrics oa.libre oa.journals

Date tagged:

12/07/2012, 10:44

Date published:

12/07/2012, 15:14