The Challenge of Brand-Name Journals and OA: Interview with Stuart Taylor

"Stuart Taylor, Publishing Director at The Royal Society, has been following the trajectory of academic journal publishing his entire career. A proponent of open access digital publishing, in 2015 Taylor organized the first 'Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication' conference for the Royal Society. The 4-day event brought together scientists, funders, librarians, and publishers, to discuss key issues in scientific publishing including reproducibility, open science, and current publishing models.

Of all the outcomes of the 'Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication' conference, Taylor said one recurring theme that stuck out was academics’ ongoing obsession with getting published in brand-name journals, or the most well-known titles in their field. While Taylor sees promise in recent digital publishing innovations and open access (OA), he believes scholars’ continued focus on publishing in brand-name journals may be holding back OA publishing progress. By favoring such brand-name journals scholars are enabling their publishers to charge high OA publishing fees much like they have subscriptions.

Taylor argues the power to turn the tide and lower OA publishing costs rests in the hands of the scholarly community. He believes it’s up to funders, institutions, and individual scholars to shift focus from journal brands and find new ways of assessing research value and reputation in order to force change in the market. 'It’s not so much the publishers who need to change - it’s the researchers themselves who need to think differently about how they communicate their findings,' said Taylor, in a recent interview with Scholastica. Below is the full Q&A in which Taylor discusses his thoughts on how to address scholars’ focus on brand-name journals to ensure the advancement of open access. The views Taylor has expressed in this interview are his own and do not necessarily reflect Royal Society policy."