The vicious cycle of scholarly publishing – Flockademic – Medium

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-08-29

Summary:

"Given the above actors and their differing and sometimes conflicting interests, there are several knobs we can turn to try to bring about a change. The largest impact we’ve seen thus far in terms of increasing the amount of articles published as Open Access is by funders demanding it. Unfortunately, this comes with unintended consequences such as driving up the price for authors.

Another potential avenue is to encourage journals to move to publishers that do not rely on profits from subscription or publication fees. The quality of a journal is largely defined by who comprise its editorial board, so if they can be convinced to switch publishers, those journals can be good for both its authors’ careers and the adoption of Open Access. It will also pressure existing publishers to introduce more favourable terms for their journals. This is what organisations such as LingOAMathOA, and PsyOA hope to achieve.

Researchers themselves might also be persuaded to avoid the traditional publishers. The project The Cost of Knowledge aims to achieve this by getting researchers to sign a declaration that they will not volunteer as an author, reviewer or editor of Elsevier journals. Since researchers often publish together, though, it might be too much to ask of researchers to convince their co-authors to take the potential career hit. Indeed, it appears that not all of the signatories of the declaration managed to keep themselves to it.

Finally, it might be worthwhile to try to change the way researchers are evaluated. If they were judged more directly by the quality of their work rather than where it was published, they would be free to publish it in proper Open Access journals. The most prominent of such initiatives is altmetrics, which aims to provide evaluation metrics independent of the journal such as the number of article downloads, comments, recommendations and citations. Several projects are now publishing altmetrics, but it remains to be seen whether it will actually be used when evaluating academics."

Link:

https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

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Date tagged:

08/29/2017, 11:30

Date published:

08/29/2017, 07:30