The Perfect Storm of Open Access – Slaw

"A colleague writes of what seems like the perfect storm of open access hitting the students with whom she works… My students and I publish in the journal Evolution: 'Education and Outreach published by Springer. Great outlet for our work. But, they just went open access (good).The cost to publish for an author now is $1,600 (bad). For grad students, this is prohibitive. I told my dean and she said there is no to support grad student publications. That wasn't surprising. Do the math: 60 students times several pubs a year at that cost would be a significant chunk of change. But, more surprising is this journal, which is very good, was now considered by them to be of lesser quality, now that it's a ‘pay to publish’ journal. My students noted that it won't be able to count these pubs towards tenure now. So, what was a good outlet now is ‘tainted.’ So, what we need is not only the business model to change, but attitudes have to change too.' My multi-part response amid an increasingly complicated field of openings… 1. If Springer is going open access, and it does look that way, then it may be better to see your librarian rather than dean about article processing charges (APC), as the libraries will save on subscription fees, and libraries are setting up funds to pay APC. But will those funds cover graduate students, and how many articles a year?  ... 2. Further on this “just say no to open access,” it needs to be recognized that this greater public access is happening on a number of fronts, not least of which is the Canadian Tri-Council research funding agencies declaring a common OA policy for 2014, as well as the recent White House initiative intended to see all federally funded research (following on the NIH requirement dating back to 2008) requiring “public access” of the final, peer-reviewed draft, within twelve months of publication ... 3. And on the question of prestige, by any measure, including the ISI Impact Factor, open access, and article processing fees, are not a factor. The highest ranked journal, by Impact Factor, in the field of biology is PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology. It does not appear in print and has always been open access (with APC of $2,900) ... 4. Studies of APC and prestige do show that highest APC are levied by the international corporate publishers, such as Springer, while the average for APCs is $900 (Solomon et al.) ... 5. In addition, new models are emerging. PeerJ for the sciences charges $99 for life, allowing one article per year (or $299 for unlimited number of articles) ... 6. In the short term, however, the best advice may still be to publish in subscription journals of choice, and take advantage of the journal's author archiving policy (with publisher policies collected in the Sherpa/Romeo database) ... 7. The longer term appears to involve the shift of the current $10 billion or so in publisher revenue from subscription to APC in some coordinated way. The libraries could collectively manage this to ensure that publishing opportunities within all disciplines, from biomedical to philosophy are covered, likely through both a shifting of library budgets and a taxing of grants that allows the grant-rich disciplines subsidize the rest ... 8. This formative period makes it hard for graduate students and faculty to figure how best to work within this changing system, but it is ideal time, for the same reason, to look for opportunities to promote greater access to their and others' research, while also showing some vigilance over the cost of this access, so that it is not subject to the excesses of subscription pricing ..."